


Lazaretto

by doctorcolubra



Series: Hellouin [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Bad Parenting, Bisexuality, Disabled Character, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Gaslighting, Gen, Hospitals, Medical Procedures, Nonbinary Character, Prison, Recreational Drug Use, Telepathy, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-04
Updated: 2019-09-21
Packaged: 2020-10-06 19:23:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 31,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20512202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doctorcolubra/pseuds/doctorcolubra
Summary: In 2097, the Barany Process isolated a gene predisposing children to develop psionic abilities—along with epilepsy, autism, migraines, and other conditions. These children were taught at the remote Mount Hellouin school on the colonial planet Perdigon. Now, in 2120, the first generation of Barany kids are...supposed to be adults, apparently? Lev Mozersky, the most powerful telepath in the galaxy, is a barely-functional disaster. His exploitative father is in prison, he's just met a girl who seems way too good for him, and he's trying to finish his undergrad without having a nervous breakdown. When he discovers that he and his friends from Hellouin may be in danger, Lev has a bunch of new problems thataren'tin his head. And some that are.





	1. rabbit in the moon

**Author's Note:**

> My poor beautiful red-headed stepchild of a story! I was posting it on my personal website for reasons that frankly now escape me—it started as fic and is still fic-adjacent, and this way it's significantly easier to post and keep track of. If this is a misuse of the Original Work tag, I'll just go stand under an overpass and yell my telepath story at passing cars.
> 
> If you enjoyed reading _not really now not anymore_ and wanted more of that setting, here you go. It's significantly more complicated to write than _NRNNA_ was, so comments and feedback are even more welcome than usual. I'm super insecure about it! Try it and just let me know how it hits, okay?
> 
> (Spotify playlist [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/39TKvW5rOWLouv3GBjnzOE?si=e1kfQrKLTWuhRmAnOH6bEQ))

_The living is a passing traveler;_  
_The dead, a man come home._  
_One brief journey betwixt heaven and earth,_  
_Then, alas! we are the same old dust of ten thousand ages._  
_The rabbit in the moon pounds the medicine in vain;_  
_Fu-sang, the tree of immortality, has crumbled to kindling wood._  
_Man dies, his white bones are dumb without a word_  
_When the green pines feel the coming of the spring._  
_Looking back, I sigh; looking before, I sigh again._  
_What is there to prize in life’s vaporous glory?_

— Li Bai

My father used to take me to the Moon—when I’d been good, he said, although I knew our visits had nothing to do with my behaviour. He would bring me along when he needed me…and that was how he thought of it, that he needed me. That he’d have been ruined by now, dozens of times over, if he didn’t have me. That he was grateful for me, like an acrobat is grateful for the net. I was only six, and it made me feel important. 

Nowadays, as they say, the Moon is full. Thinkpieces have been recycling that headline for months. Every square inch of lunar territory is owned, accounted for, built up as much as regulations will allow. Maximum occupancy, no chance of a rental anywhere. Not so much as a sublet. But nobody lives on the Moon full-time. Too inconvenient, too uncomfortable, not much to do. It’s quiet now and it was quiet back then.

Bouncing in the lunar rover, claustrophobic in my child-size EV suit, I could barely even see the landscape. The heads-up display on my helmet’s screen was blinking and flickering. I hated blinking lights—my neurologist said they didn’t actually trigger my seizures, but they made my brain feel like a broken slot machine no matter what she said. _Patient complains of discomfort._ The low gravity made me queasy. The Lunokhod’s wheels were kicking up huge white clouds of ancient dust, obscuring the billion-dollar view.

The speaker inside my helmet clicked on and my father’s voice was in my ear, carefully speaking English. Tutors said I wasn’t verbal enough, which my father believed was a language issue; he thought my English was lagging behind my Russian (my mother’s fault, he imagined) and that I just needed practice. “There, you see? Look at it, Lyova. The blue planet herself. What do you think? It’s beautiful. Isn’t it?”

I couldn’t see anything beautiful. I couldn’t see anything over the dash of the Lunokhod. Maybe if I’d been taller.

“Lyova. Remember to answer questions when someone speaks to you.”

Laboriously, I hit the mic button with my chin as instructed and replied with one word: _“Nyet.”_

An annoying response, and my father was annoyed. “No what? No, you won’t answer? No, it’s not beautiful?”

“Second one.”

“Well, you’re never going to be satisfied, if Earth isn’t good enough for you. That’s all there is, you know,” he said. “The only place we were ever meant to live. All the other planets we try to settle, we don’t really belong there. It’s dark down there because it’s night, but can you see that bright spot there in the north? That’s Piter, that’s where we live in summer.”

“I can only see dust clouds. And I want to go home.”

My father decided not to waste any more time. _Useless when he’s in a mood._ “You’ll settle down in the hotel.”

* * * 

The Chang-o Hotel was a white pimple on the Moon’s cratered face, a low rounded hill in the Sea of Tranquility that was built out of the lunar regolith, with most of the building underground. I remained resolutely miserable until we got inside, when the concierge helped me out of my EV suit. 

“Oh, someone’s tired. That was a long trip for you, wasn’t it?” said the concierge, also in English. Her name was Ling, and she was a matronly, comforting woman with silver hair at her temples. I liked her right away because I could sense that her courtesy wasn’t fake: out of all the boring duties she had on this empty rock, making a fuss over a small boy was an agreeable one. I reminded her of her youngest grandson, and Ling thought it was unconscionable to drag a child through spaceflights so casually. _It’s not good for them. But these people don’t really care about their own children,_ she was thinking. “Sit down and rest, and I’ll bring you something nice to eat.”

My father was still unsuiting, occupied with gladhanding the staff, answering a phone call, and giving orders to his assistant. His assistant was a long-suffering young man named Sergei, whom I remember as handsome, with a broad, clear forehead (you know, don’t you, how a man’s high forehead can sometimes give you the impression of great sincerity?). His smile was kind, but he always looked like he hadn’t slept in days, permanent blue shadows under his grey eyes. 

Sergei was using some emergency steamer gadget on my father’s suit jacket, his thoughts fretful and preoccupied. My father forgot Sergei’s existence for minutes at a time, carrying on his three conversations at once. 

Anton Mozersky, my father. Stocky, with receding black hair clipped close and combed smoothly back, like a seal’s fur. He had olive skin, like mine—his mother had been from Azerbaijan, but I never knew her. Under the unflattering light of the airlocks, he looked sallow. He kept a trim moustache, and he wore glasses with smoky lenses to make himself appear more imposing: without them, he had small, weak eyes, vulnerable and wet. _Wear something white around the face_ was his other great fashion maxim, a crisp collar and a silk scarf. 

He held out his arms and Sergei vested him in his suit jacket, brushing the last of the lunar dust from his clothes. From a sealed plastic box, Sergei brought out a dew-fresh red rose for my father’s buttonhole. It was perfect, Sergei was thinking with relief. Nothing more could go wrong now. 

Ling returned with a crisp, golden pastry on a red paper napkin. I was a slow eater and often inadvertently insulted my hosts—I had to poke and sniff unfamiliar foods for a long time before I felt ready to eat them, investigating the textures. “These are mooncakes for Chinese New Year. The inside is sweet,” she told me. “Try it.”

“I’m trying it,” I said, even though I thought that was obvious. When I felt displeasure from her, I tried one of my adult-friendly phrases that I had learned, like a foreign tourist. “Thank you for helping me.”

Like my father, she decided that language was my problem. “You speak English so well,” she said, encouraging. “You must work hard in school.”

“He speaks it perfectly well, he’s only shy,” my father said, as he marched over to take me with him to the hotel lobby. Ling followed us. “And in a bad mood. Is Dewdney here yet?”

“His ETA is about twenty-four minutes, coming from Tranquility station.” Ling unhooked a velvet rope in the lobby to let us into the hotel bar, which was called Mǔlì. There was no such thing as after-hours, for men as rich as my father was in those days. “Meanwhile, please relax. Something to drink?”

“Please. Show her how I like my martini, Seryozha.” 

Sergei stood up silently, giving Ling a tight smile, and withdrew her to the bar. 

My father turned his attention back to me. We were sitting at a small table inlaid with mother-of-pearl, and although Mǔlì was underground, it had crisp video feeds on the walls, which made _trompe-l’oeil_ windows.

Now, finally, I could see the Earth. I’d seen it from passenger ship windows before, of course, but the view from the Moon is still every bit as good as advertised. Only a bright crescent of fierce, burning blue, alive in the dark in spite of everything, girt with the green of West Africa, where the terminus of night crossed the planet’s face. Earth’s city lights by night were like constellations, and my mother used to point them out to me during descents. Finding Moscow first let me find St. Petersburg, like using Ursa Major to find the pole star. Then the boot of Italy, the Arabian peninsula fringed with gold like an altar-cloth, and the trickle of light that ran all along the Nile. 

The pastry was crumbling apart in my napkin, and my father reached out to touch my shoulder, bringing my attention back to it. “Eat,” he said. “Now, when Ling gets back, she’s going to take you to a playroom that’s just for you, okay? You can bring your tablet. You’ve been working hard in your lessons with Ezra, haven’t you?”

“Yes, papa.”

“Good. That’s what he says too. Quick learner. He says you’re very subtle for someone so young—you know this word? Means no one would even know you’re there.” He smiled at me. “We’re going to play a game. When my friend Dewdney gets here, you’ll hide in the other room. If he knows you’re there then you lose the game, all right?”

“I’m not a little kid, you know.” I didn’t feel like one. You grow up fast when you hear adults’ unfiltered thoughts all the time. The condescension was unnecessary, and my sense of importance took a hit. The fact that my father thought he was fooling me—I was supposed to be his accomplice, his secret weapon. “You want him to sign the papers in your briefcase.”

My father didn’t like that bluntness, but he smoothed away the frown that crossed his face. “Don’t force him. Subtle. Make him want to. He starts to relax, he sees that the offer isn’t as bad as he thought, he decides it might be worth the risk—make sure he remembers that, that it was his decision.”

“I know. I will.”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full. I’m afraid he might be paranoid. He knows how closely I work with Ezra and the Hellouin project. He knows about you. So you have to be subtle.”

“I _will._”

Ling returned with Sergei, and she brought me, the mooncake crumbs, and my red napkin to the other room. 

It wasn’t actually a playroom, of course, just a storage room off the lobby: pallets of bottled water stacked to the ceiling in the corners, a glass cabinet with emergency gear, some tech equipment locked up with a stern handwritten warning (_do NOT powercycle, call IT for help_), and a lost-and-found box. Nothing fun in the box, only scarves and gloves. Any other kid would have been dangerously bored there. My normal response to boredom was to zone out and look around for interesting minds to listen to, so I didn’t mind helping my father with the contract. He could have just asked me.

I sat down on one of the water pallets, my tablet on my lap. 

The Moon, being barely inhabited, was a quiet place for a telepath, silent as a snowfall; the few minds in Chang-o rang with clarity. I could hear my father, anxious, dissatisfied with his plan, suspicious that Sergei was judging him for this. And I could hear Sergei, who (truth be told) didn’t approve, but who wasn’t free to say anything about it. There was Ling, hoping for a generous gratuity from her VIP guests. She was hoping for enough to replace her dishwasher at home. Then there was the bartender, hating his job, cutting lemons while he thought about home, a problem he’d had with his girlfriend before he last shipped up to Tranquility…

When my father’s colleague Dewdney arrived at the hotel, I switched my focus to his mind. Dewdney _was_ paranoid, but he had already made the decision to come here and listen. Willing to be moved, at least a little bit. He was a quick, jittery man with sharp, pale eyes, but he relaxed right away when he saw that my father was alone. “Turn off all your tech,” he said, sitting down at the table with my father. “Wearables too, c’mon. I don’t want any of this recorded.”

That wasn’t the right frame of mind at all. I made him relax with a careful trickle of endorphins in the brain, something my best friend John Sciarra had shown me how to do. Out of the four of us at Hellouin, Sciarra was the best at dealing with _brains_: he knew how to prod and manipulate the physical structures, not just the thoughts. Dewdney settled down, looking up at the Earth.

They talked for awhile, and I didn’t pay close attention to what they were talking about, just tinkering with Dewdney’s mood. He was tired and frustrated from the trip, thinking that my father was full of shit, so I had to work on him a lot. Turning his attention first to the brilliant blue crescent of the Earth, to trigger some awe and nostalgia. Making him feel a little more at ease, bonding with my father, trusting him. I used the same phrases that I found bubbling up from his mind, selecting the ones that suited my father’s purposes and rejecting the ones that didn’t. _Everything’s fine. You can handle Mozersky. You’ve already handled him, in fact. No need to rub the guy’s face in the dirt. Might as well be a good sport. You’re not petty like…_

I left the thought unfinished, and sure enough, Dewdney immediately supplied a name on his own. _Not like Magnus. It’s true. That attitude makes everything toxic. Turning rivals into enemies. Burning bridges. We might need Mozersky again someday. _

That was a good point, so I leaned on it a little more heavily while my father took out the contract, first leafing through it himself. _Don’t burn every single bridge. Keep your options open—that’s all we’re talking about. _

Dewdney took the contract and paged through it, sceptical but only a little. Thinking about my father’s top lawyer, an unctuous stereotype of his profession who drank too much. _Not seriously worried about _his_ devious traps, are we? Look, there’s an obvious overreach. Strike and initial that change, just to show you’re paying attention._

Dewdney struck and initialed the line, and I could feel his smile, a patient smirk. “Nice try. But the rest of this looks…” _Okay._ “It looks okay. I think we can do this.”

I solidified his confidence. A pretentious clown, Mozersky, who was paying for his vanities now. _Sad to see him like this, he doesn’t even know the crash is coming…or he knows, but he thinks he can still get out of it without losing his shirt. But he might still be useful to us. Lots of tasty tech talent in his company, lots of good IP. The price won’t go much lower. _

Dewdney signed the papers.

I changed my grip on his attention, looser now, letting his gaze fall on the shivering clarity of the vodka in his glass. _Good. Settled. Time for a drink. Russians expect it, you gotta show them you can handle it... _

Once he’d listened to a toast from my father and knocked one back, I released him entirely, and my mind returned to the boring room. My tablet had gone to sleep in my lap. I tapped the screen and brought up a game, waiting for my father to call me back to him.

* * * 

My criminal career didn’t last long.

At that age, I still struggled with remembering that other people _couldn’t_ hear my thoughts the way I heard theirs. Like those people who still make gestures when they’re on the phone. This made me a bad liar, because I would forget that lying was even an option. 

One afternoon, my mother came for me at school, tight-lipped and pale, her thoughts full of dread and rage. _I’ll have to go back to Kaluga—if they’ll even let me bring the kids—how long will this take? As if you don’t know already how it’s going to end. Should have known, should have known better, should have known better from the start than to trust a man like this…and I have to stop, I have to stop thinking like this, Lev will hear me…_

When my mother started thinking this way, I would try to pretend like I hadn’t heard. That just seemed kinder, somehow. I rode the tram with her in silence, staring out the window at the city streets. 

A panel of men and women in charcoal suits sat behind a psionic shielding wall to interview me. They were investigators, I later found out, for the Commonwealth Criminal Investigation Department. The barrier was heavy, eighteen inches thick, metal polished to a highly reflective sheen. A monitor screen showed me the visual feed from behind the wall, like a window. _Trompe-l’oeil. _ Four adult strangers who were trying to look sympathetic but objective. Probably creeped out by this assignment.

“Does your father ever make you help him?” asked the one on the far left. “With work?” 

“Sometimes,” I said. They must have known already. Hadn’t it always been obvious? “Only when we go to the Moon.”

My lawyer wasn’t even there yet. It was a little-kid mistake. 

* * * 

My father was indicted, eventually, on sixteen various counts of fraud. While I still don’t really understand the intricacies of his financial schemes, it seems that he overextended himself and made dangerous enemies. Gentle Sergei had been the traitor, and I found out later that it had been on my behalf, reporting my father for exploiting a child in order to commit a crime. With no precedents on the books about the legality of using a telepath to force someone to sign a contract, my father’s case became a landmark in psionic law. R v Mozersky, 2105. 

He went to a Commonwealth penal colony called Canaan on Phrixus. Minimum security, but dismal and isolated. My father called it Siberia, and there was definitely a resemblance, even in the local industry: diamonds, uranium, oil. 

From then on, I saw him rarely. My mother divorced him, lost a lot of money to his company for Byzantine reasons, and then got some of it back in a later settlement. We were comfortable enough, but no longer eye-wateringly rich. 

We lived on Keto, an ocean planet like Nephele, whose colonies were mostly megaships and floating platforms. Keto had not much to recommend it, except for being close to my father. We had to skip from one ship to another, usually because of me—ships were tense environments, too many people packed close together, and the mental noise was unbearable. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t function in the little shipboard classrooms, and got in trouble for hiding or crying too much or generally driving my teachers bananas.

After the _Telemachus_, the _Judique_, the _Glooscap_, the _Gripfast_, the _Whangarei_, the _Hiddensee_, and the _Wollongong_, my mother gave up on Keto. By this time she was running out of ideas. Nephele was just as bad, she said, another overpopulated ocean planet, so she took us home to Kaluga in western Russia, where we lived with her mother. This went sour in a year, and from Kaluga we crossed the globe to live in Chicago. Good hospitals, far away from the coasts—good enough for us.

In Chicago, she hired a lot of pros: tutors, au pairs, child therapists, as well as my neurologist and my psychiatrist and my pediatrician. And there were researchers who had an understandable interest in learning what I could do.

The journal articles called me by the pseudonym Mitya, to protect my privacy. There were brain scans a few times a year, and I was good at those—the technicians liked me. _You didn’t move an inch the whole time, good job. _ I spent a lot of time taking neuropsychological tests, which amounted to sitting in an empty hallway and pecking at the screen of an unfamiliar tablet. Lab devices were always a few years out of date, with battered corners and scotch-tape on the back. Tests of cognition, memory, attention, and long structured inventories of bleak questions about my mental health. 

> Do you feel restless, like you can’t sit still?  
Do familiar surroundings sometimes seem strange, confusing, threatening or unreal to you?  
Do you feel like something terrible is about to happen?  
Have you heard unusual sounds like banging, clicking, hissing, clapping or ringing in your ears?  
Do you feel worthless?  
Do you sometimes get strange feelings on or just beneath your skin, like bugs crawling?

Nobody hurt me, I should tell you. The interviews were tedious, not abusive. Nor am I telling you this story in a bid for sympathy. On the contrary—I liked the researchers, and I think they liked me too. The neurology department of Northwestern Memorial still sends me a birthday card every year.

I remember once I got a concussion—while I was trying to teach my sister Dasha how to skate, she ploughed into me at top speed and knocked me over. She was all of five years old, and I was ten. The back of my head cracked against the rough outdoor ice.

In the hospital, the attending neurologist asked my permission to let his students observe. Which was routine; I said yes. Seven students filed into the curtained cubicle, all of them gracious, polite, and curious.

“With concussions in patients who’ve undergone a Barany process,” said the attending, “it’s important to check for any changes in their abilities. The same way you would check vision, hearing, and so on. This science is new, but there are still signs you can observe and symptoms that the patient might report. For instance. A concussed telepathic patient who seems otherwise clear-headed but can no longer use their abilities with the same degree of power, focus, or fluency—what do you do?”

The med students all knew the answer. “Treat as though a baseline patient showed mental confusion.”

“Good. And new abilities? Suppose the same patient started to report precognition or telekinesis? What do we do in a case like that?”

“Scan for growths or lesions?” said one of the students, hesitantly.

“On the right track. You would certainly order a scan, but more pertinent to concussions would be…?”

“Subdural hematoma.”

“Good. Let’s assess our patient…”

They asked me their questions: what did I see at the moment of impact? What did I feel when I awoke from unconsciousness? How many minds could I sense in the room? Could I hear their thoughts clearly? 

The neurologist apologised later for bringing students in. He thought that I must have felt like a carnival freak, being gawked at by strangers, but I didn’t. I just felt useful.

* * * 

When I was eleven, my mother started losing her hair. Not visibly—she wasn’t going bald like my father, of course, but her tawny-blonde hair was coming out from the roots in delicate handfuls, filling her Mason-Pearson brush, clogging the drains. Her dentist gave her a plastic guard to wear on her teeth at night, to keep her from grinding them. She lost weight. Stress.

It wasn’t my _fault_, she said, but still, I knew that I was the _cause_ of the stress. I couldn’t help knowing it, even though it would have been nice to believe a lie for once. My mother worried about me day and night. She loved me, but she was afraid she would fail me, and that I would grow up into something monstrous. 

_Anton was the one who wanted to make him this way,_ she would think to herself at night, when I was meant to be asleep. _I just wanted a baby. Now Anton’s gone and I can’t undo what he did to Lev._

When she asked if I wanted to spend more time with Ezra and Jacob, I said I did.

* * * 

Ezra brought me to the abbey on Perdigon that summer, with Sciarra and the twins. A team of American Buddhists and French Benedictines had joined forces to rebuild a shared religious community on the ruins of the old St. Columban’s. The Buddhists called it Annihilation, and the Catholics called it Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Rencontre. Our Lady of the Good Encounter, that encounter being the one between the Theotokos and the angel Gabriel.

“Don’t take any of them too seriously,” said Ezra. “About the religious stuff. But the meditation teachers really know their—they know what they’re talking about. You need to learn how to control where your mind goes, and they’re better at explaining that stuff than I am. But if you don’t like it we’ll stop and go back to Mount Hellouin. You’ll tell me if you don’t like it, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Murdoch’s got a prototype for a wearable that she thinks might help. You remember the psionic shielding in the courtroom, right? Old Bija tech, it’s the only real advancement in psionics that they ever made,” Ezra said with some satisfaction. “Murdoch and I were saying that if those materials can disrupt your abilities when used as a barrier, we might be able to build a smaller device that would do the same thing. Right now, it hooks around your ear like an old-fashioned hearing aid, but she thinks we can make it even smaller, so that it’ll plug into a medi-port—anyway. The point is, it would let you turn the telepathy on and off.”

“Really?”

“Maybe. Don’t get your hopes too high. But not too low either. Medium hopes, like 65% hopes.”

But there was no need for lowered expectations: in two weeks, Murdoch gave me the prototype, in an anonymous plastic casing that she’d scavenged from an old head-mounted display. The wearable was chunky, ugly, and got a little too warm after a few hours of use, but I could turn it on and make any place as silent as the Moon. The noise stopped. I could sleep again.

It worked. It was the first thing that had ever worked. 


	2. disclosure

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What's fun? House-hunting in the white-knuckle weeks before classes start. Even more fun when you have a condition guaranteed to alarm even the chillest of roommates.

On the planet Ursalia, the settlement of Le Havre had snow in late August. Lots of it. Deep, dark polar nights made frosh week a series of punishing alcoholic marathons for the new students at Regiopolis College, and I had to step over puddles of frozen puke on the sidewalk. Industrial dumper bots carried loads of snow to the edge of town, building ice mountains that were dangerous fun for the local kids. A determined idiot could lose a limb out there. Huge ploughs with whirling blades cruised the streets, blue lights flashing, automated voice announcing _danger, this vehicle is unmanned…__attention, ceci est un véhicule sans pilote…_

Le Havre was a hilly, rocky place with steep sidewalks. Terraformers had carved the town’s streets deep into the hills, leaving tall artificial cliffs. Cross-sections of the bedrock visible, like a geology textbook illustration. Making straight the crooked paths and laying low the mountains. The city had promised us pedestrian tunnels on the Regiopolis campus within three years. Fat chance of that happening on schedule, but I’d probably still be here to use them—I was in my fifth year of a busted-up undergrad degree, knocked off course by my glitching brain.

Students in Le Havre filled a couple of dormitories on the campus itself, as well as a small section of town that used to be a neighbourhood of workers’ housing for the mines and the shipyard. We sarcastically called it the Latin Quarter. Old colonial modular houses, ugly but tough, they were painted bright colours for various apocryphal reasons: to keep the workers from shooting themselves if they saw one more grey box; to keep drunk engineers from walking into the wrong house at night; to keep sleepy pilots from mistaking the barren area for a landing strip. 

I was in the Latin Quarter to see about housing—something I should have done last year in the spring. My own fuckup. Trying to finagle this in September was next to impossible, but luckily my standards were low. I’d live with anyone who would have me.

The house in question was royal blue and canary yellow, like a macaw. The button for the Lumen was covered in a piece of gaffer tape, with a semi-bilingual sign on the door: _LE DOORBELL EST FUCKÉE._

So I knocked, kicking the snow off my boots as I waited.

Someone answered—I wasn’t confident about their gender, but they were shorter than me with close-cropped black hair. They were serious and unsmiling, but their first reaction to me was indifference. “You’re the one who called about the attic, right?”

“Yeah, hi, I’m Lev Mozersky.” I kept my gloves on to shake hands. “Is it a good time to take a look at the place?”

“Sure. I’m Brace, second-year law. What’s your major?”

“Philosophy.”

They didn’t think that was a properly serious major. Fair enough. "To do what?"

“Career, you mean? I'll probably end up teaching.”

“Okay. Something you should know is that we take study time _really_ seriously here,” said Brace, letting me inside. “There’s a schedule that we all put together and we just can’t have noise during those hours.”

“That’s fine.” I was still bent over in the one-legged School of Athens pose to unzip my boots and leave them on the tray by the door. “I’m a quiet guy, you won’t hear much from me on any schedule.”

“Right. But we _are_ gonna need you to check out the schedule, let us know if there are any issues with it, and sign a roommate contract.”

“Yeah, no problem.” I don’t argue with the kind of person who drafts contracts recreationally. I also try not to share housing with them, but it was August. If this house turned me down, I’d be fucked. To appease Brace, I added, “That’s a really good rule.”

“We try. Leave your coat on the hook, shoes off.” Brace led me down the front hall, pausing to show me the living room. A couch that was older than me, nice laminate flooring, real curtains on the bay window. “TV and stereo in here. No screens bigger than a laptop in the bedrooms, no external speakers. Noise issue. You didn’t find a place to live all summer?”

“I was having health issues.”

Brace assumed that I meant depression, and thought of some previous roommate who had suffered from it and left the place foul through neglect. “What kind of health issues?”

“Can we wait for everyone else to get here?” I was starting to match their brusque tone, and tried to dial it back. _Be cool, be nice, be likeable…_ “Just so that I don’t have to keep repeating. Why’s this room available so late, anyway? Did you have someone bow out?”

“Yup. Girl had to go back home to China, family crisis.” Brace showed me a broom closet, a pantry that had been converted to an extra bathroom, a kitchen in the rear of the house. 

Behind the kitchen was a solarium lined with windows, which had probably been a greenhouse for the workers to grow vegetables—a few rows of black water barrels on shelves served as thermal mass to control the temperature while the slanted windows let in what little sunshine we got in winter. The other housemates were waiting there, seated on benches at a long rough-hewn table.

“So, health issues,” said Brace, sitting down and motioning for me to join them.

That had been quick. “Uh, well, first of all, hello,” I said to the others. Two girls and two guys, apart from Brace. “I’m Lev, I’m a…it’s technically my fifth year. Victory lap. I’m in philosophy, and I was just telling Brace here that I had health problems over the summer that kept me from looking for a house.”

“That’s totally okay—dude, he doesn’t have to say anything about that stuff if he doesn’t want to,” one of the girls scolded Brace. “I’m Jo, that’s Lupe, and the guys are Anders and Michel.”

“We just want to set expectations for chores early on,” said Brace, prompting a lot of silent annoyance from the others. “So we want to know if anything would get in the way of cleaning. Just good to get it out in the open.”

“I’m able to clean.” _Be cool, you don’t have to like them, you just have to occupy the same space for awhile, it’s okay…_ “I have epilepsy and migraines, so some days are bad ones, but I clean up after myself.”

“Naturally, yeah, we all do.” Lupe was a cute, chubby girl with a mole on one cheek. “You’re not on trial here, it’s okay. Are you working?”

“No, I’m trust-fund scum. My rent gets paid every month, guaranteed.”

This made the atmosphere warm considerably toward me.

“What do your parents do?” Jo asked.

“My dad used to be in biotech, he made a lot of money at it.” Almost twenty years after my father’s fall from grace, and nobody really cared about him anymore. He was famous enough for an encyclopedic entry, but kids my age didn’t know his name offhand. “He and my mom got divorced, so she invested in a shipping firm back in the Sol system.”

“Gotta set up the guillotine for you, _mijo_,” said Lupe, although it was good-natured. “So no work schedule. Do you ever have friends over?”

“Not a lot,” I said, although the honest answer was _not at all._ “I’m pretty…uh, pretty introverted. My friends are all at other schools, so we’ll do video calls and stuff? But I have to get to bed early to control my seizures, so I’m out at 10 pm. And I use headphones for everything because I just like that better anyway—seriously, I’ve never once had a roommate complain to me about noise.”

“What _did_ they complain about?” Brace asked.

That was an uncomfortable question, but I had to tell them. “I’m a Barany process kid. A telepath.”

“Are you fuckin’ kidding me?” said Anders, speaking for the first time. I hadn’t been paying much attention to his thoughts, but his mind flared suddenly with alarm. “No. Veto. We’re not having some guy in our house who can mess with our goddamn heads.”

“Take it easy.” Lupe turned back to me. “My nephew had a Barany process—no, shit, wait. It was the other one.”

“An anti-Barany?” Not every parent wanted Ezra’s genes, considering the downsides. 

“That’s the one. To prevent…” Lupe tipped her head back to remember. “They said it improves neurological health and stability.”

“It totally does. It just also removes any predisposition to psionic abilities. Trade-off.” I had been through these explanations many times before. Practiced speeches. I turned my head to show them the little medi-port installed in the bone of my skull just behind my left ear. Small, no bigger than a headset jack on the side of a tablet. “You see the silicon cap right there? It’s white? That’s where my blocker sits, it’s called a Neurable. It’s disengaged right now.” I pushed the silicon cap inward until I felt the click, and their thoughts went quiet. “And when it’s turned on, like that, the cap lights up green. So now I can’t hear you thinking.”

“I do _not_ like this,” Anders said. 

“What exactly do you think’s gonna happen, dude?” asked Jo, impatient. “You’re barely even around.”

Brace wasn’t sure; they didn’t want to look backward or plebeian. _I’m not a hick, I’m not afraid of technology. But…_ “It’s not crazy to expect privacy in your own place.”

“Yeah, but he can turn it off.” Lupe was on my side, or at least she felt a little bad for me. “There’s no reason to think he’s gonna invade your privacy. Like, I have the ability to open your mail, but I don’t do it. Because privacy, and also who gives a fuck? You guys aren’t that interesting.”

“Well, you do _not_ have permission to read my mind,” Brace said officiously. “Unless I give written consent—”

“Listen, sorry, but it doesn’t work like that,” I interrupted. “I can see your face, I can hear your voice, and I can sense your mind. Your brain broadcasts your thoughts in a certain radius around your body, twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week. I’m just an antenna that picks up the signal, it’s involuntary. I’ve had this all my life, so I’m not easily shocked. Invading people's privacy isn't some kind of thrill for me. I don’t judge people for having weird thoughts, or bad thoughts, or sexual thoughts, or anything else—thoughts just happen. They come and go. I work hard at minding my own business. And I don’t tell other people’s secrets. Period.”

Brace and Anders glanced at one another, thinking about whether they should accept this or not. 

Michel had been quiet because his English was a little weak, which made him wonder something. “You speak French?”

I made the traditional _not really_ gesture, a waver of my hand. _“Un peu.”_

“So you can understand my thoughts if I am thinking in French?”

_“Un peu,”_ I said again with a shrug, but it was a good question. “Hearing people think in other languages, it’s the same as watching movies without subtitles. I can pick up a lot of what’s happening, and learn vocab a little faster, but I’d miss a lot too.”

Anders gave me a grim smile. “You speak Norwegian?”

“I speak Russian and English with a bit of school French. Think all the Norwegian thoughts you want.”

Brace was leaning more towards a yes vote now. “You said there’s a radius? What is it?”

“My range is like thirty feet, less if it’s in a crowded area.”

_“Oh._ Shit, man, that’s okay,” said Brace, relaxing. “I have the basement room and you’d be in the attic, that’s plenty of space.”

“Thanks a lot, leave the rest of us to get mind-controlled so long as _you’re_ okay.” Lupe wrinkled her nose but smiled at me. “They’re being dramatic, sorry. So that’s what happened with your last roommate? They couldn’t deal with knowing…?”

“He used to accuse me of messing with his head, which I just…wouldn’t do.” There was, of course, no real way to prove that to a bunch of strangers. “I’m not a bad person. I’m not even a bad roommate.”

“Yeah, but everybody says that,” said Anders.

Jo was siding with Lupe, who was the only person in the house that she liked. “He didn’t have to tell us, you know. If he meant to mess with our heads.”

“He could still erase our memories.”

That was where I lost my patience and got up from the table. “Okay, this might not work out.”

“Whoa, whoa, wait,” said Lupe, holding up her hands in a time-out T. “Everybody be cool. Look, rent day’s coming and now that Yanmei’s gone we gotta get that attic room filled. Lev’s being open with us. Anybody _could_ turn out to be a freak, and if you can’t handle that possibility then maybe you should think about getting your own place. Housemates are a gamble.”

Brace got up too. They figured that Lupe was right—rent day loomed large in their worries—but still wanted to save face a little. “We’re not deciding right away. We’ll take a vote later tonight and let you know. But let’s keep moving, we’ll show you around upstairs…”

Jo called me later that night and left a message. _We talked it over and...we decided, um, that we would love to have you live with us..._

_Love_, I knew, was a strong word. They just hadn't been able to find another candidate who measured up to Brace's exacting requirements, and they'd chosen to take the gamble. But that was good enough for me. 


	3. apropos of the wet snow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lev meets Nesrin, a self-assured pageant queen whose mind he can't read.

_Even now, so many years later, all this is somehow a very evil memory. _  
_I have many evil memories now... _  
_We have come almost to looking upon real life as an effort, _  
_almost as hard work, and we are all privately agreed that it is better in books. _  
— Dostoevsky, _Notes from Underground_

If you can’t beat ’em, you might as well join ’em. The party going on downstairs woke me even before they got raucous. It was only a little after ten, but I need a lot of sleep to function. Even now, my first advice to troubled telepaths is to start by getting more sleep. I had just moved in the week before, with my five cacti, my lapis blue statue of Bhaisajyaguru, and my one rich-boy prized possession, a custom mattress that cost more than a year’s tuition at Regiopolis. None of us had much—shipping all your possessions to Ursalia was expensive. But the mattress was non-negotiable. 

The Neurable, however, wasn’t designed for sleeping in—or rather, _I_ wasn’t designed for long hours of artificial interference with my brain’s natural functioning. If I wore it all day during classes, I needed a rest from it at night in the quiet hours.

I lay there in the dark for a few minutes, feeling misanthropic as I listened to the giddy thoughts and voices of the girls downstairs. But then I gave up, put on some pants and a clean shirt, and resigned myself. It wouldn’t kill me to socialise. That was what everyone kept telling me. 

The situation seemed to call for something along the lines of _omiyage_ gifts in Japan: _sorry for the inherent inconvenience involved with knowing me, here’s a present._ I didn’t have a tasteful arrangement of local delicacies from Perdigon, but I did have good weed. Booze was a bad mix with my brain, but stony indicas were a more wholesome indulgence that had my neurologist’s blessing. Medical grade, carefully sourced from a rainshadow valley farm in Harrowsmith, properly transported to preserve freshness. I chose a few sticky, rock-hard buds, bagged and jarred them considerately to control the smell, and headed downstairs.

The other housemates were out, and Lupe was holding down the kitchen. She was involved in various activist groups on campus and she did a lot of cooking for protests, baking delectable treats that were reserved for striking miners or peace marches. I liked her because she was easiest to talk to and because I hoped that winning her trust would net me some free cupcakes somewhere down the line. She was milling around in the kitchen with a few girls I didn’t know. Intimidating, beautiful girls.

“Oh hey—this is Lev, he’s renting the attic,” said Lupe, who felt relieved to see me downstairs like a normal person. She still knew little about me, and that made her uneasy, but she wanted to be friendly. “First Friday of the term, we’re celebrating. Were we bugging you?”

“No, not at all,” I said. I’ve learned how to lie, over the years. The right kind of lies, I hope. “I thought I’d come down and say hello. And contribute to the medicine cabinet, for the rest of the house.”

Lupe accepted the proffered jar of buds, pleased. “Whoa, that’s fresh,” she said after one turn of the jar lid elicited a dense aroma. “I better open this outside—thanks, man. We’ll share it fairly like good comrades, promise. Come with us? This is Nesrin, she works with us at Winter Harvest, and that’s Brook and Hina, from sociology. You want a drink?”

“I can’t, but I’ll join you guys outside.” I took my coat off the hook by the kitchen door, putting my boots on while the girls gathered vape pieces and grinders and headed out the back. 

Nesrin lingered behind, studying me as she leaned against the counter with her drink in her hand. She was as tall as me, and I had to wonder if she was a model or an actress—she had that kind of beauty that looked outlandish and eerie when it wasn’t mediated through a camera lens. Shampoo-commercial hair, long and dark, with eyes the colour of green amber. I lost my precarious grip on my social skills and could only offer her a tight, nervous smile. 

“Do you have cluster headaches?” she asked me suddenly.

I couldn’t hear her mind, and I automatically reached up to disengage the Neurable, only to find that it was already off. Of course it was. “Sorry?”

“Cluster headaches.”

“No. Migraines sometimes, but—why?”

“The medi-port.” She pointed at it. “My brother has one of those too. So do I, my hair’s covering it. Cluster headaches run in the family. It took awhile for the implant to help—we were totally in hell—but then it kicked in and the headaches stopped. Miracle cure. My grandmother thought it was literally a miracle, she said it worked because she made _dua_ for us.”

“That’s good. I mean, I’m sorry to hear that. Or both, I guess.” Medical implants do tend to disrupt my telepathy, by accident rather than by design. When I concentrated, I could still make out the buzz of her presence. Static and a faint, wobbly signal, too weak for me to discern individual thoughts. “No, um, I don’t get cluster headaches. I have an implant because I’m a Barany kid.”

“Oh. Wait, seriously? I thought that was super new—aren’t you like my age?”

“I’m twenty-three, yeah. I was the first one. I mean, technically, I wasn’t the first,” I went on. I don’t know why. “There were three successful implantations before me who never made it to term, and two IVF cycles before that so…” 

“Mm. Outside, come on,” said Nesrin, tapping me on the shoulder and carrying her drink with her as she headed for the back door. “You need to loosen up if you’re talking like that to a girl at a party. Pass me my coat?”

I very nearly didn’t. Part of me wanted to turn right around and go back upstairs—if she thought that I _could_ loosen up, she had another think coming. But it seemed like a shame to give up on life so early in the term. Her black wool coat was folded over the back of a chair, and I picked it up as I passed by, following her to the door. 

Outside, our house had an allotment, an empty, prison-like yard surrounded by chain-link fencing and high hedges of Ursalia cypress. Plants were black here, desperate to absorb whatever light they could. Some previous tenant had rigged up a painters’ scaffold in the yard and nobody had taken it down, so it served us as lawn furniture: we climbed up to sit with our legs dangling over the edge, high up enough to see over the fence. All over town, the leafless trees were bearing their winter fruit, a crop of lights.

“Wow, Christmas already,” Nesrin said wryly, once she’d climbed up to sit beside Lupe. “When do they put up the lights around here, in July?”

“Usually.” I took the last spot beside her at the end of the scaffold. At the other end, downwind, the girls were packing a pipe; Lupe had a vape that she didn’t mind sharing, although somebody always started talking about germs and it would start an ill-informed epidemiological discussion of whether pipes were just as bad. “As soon as it starts getting dark. The lights are more a psychological thing than a Christmas decoration. By the end of December, it’s almost spring. Is this your first year at Regiopolis?”

“It _is_,” said Nesrin, conspiratorial, as if I’d guessed some unlikely secret. “You got me. My family’s acting like I decided to go to school in Antarctica. Very concerned. Sending me a lot of sweaters.”

“It’s a great sweater school. I nearly majored in sweaters. Where’d you study before?”

Lupe passed the vape to Nesrin, who took a long rip before answering me. “I transferred from Hewitt University on Anacreon.”

“That’s a _really_ good school.”

“That was a little too emphatic. You make it sound like I’m moving down in the world.”

“No, no. Reg is a good school.” That came out sounding like a half-hearted protest of loyalty rather than a spirited defence. “It does have…a _lot_ less money than Hewitt. And it’s on Ursalia.”

“Anacreon is…” She pressed her lips together, and checked with me first. “Where are you from?”

Good question. “I was born on Earth, but we moved around a lot,” I said as she took another long inhale. “I spent time on Perdigon studying under Ezra Barany, but I wanted to go to a normal university, and…I do better in places that have really low population density.”

“Makes sense.” She passed the vape to me. “Moved around where?”

I took a drag from it. “Keto, and then back to Earth for awhile. I never lived on Anacreon, if that’s what you’re asking?”

“Kinda. I did the pageant circuit there, I was Miss Anacreon in 2118.” Nesrin gave me a beauty queen grin, perfect and pearly. “So I’m not supposed to talk shit.”

It caught me off-guard while I was holding in the vapour and I sputtered through a cough. “Wait, for real?”

“Yeah, dude,” said Lupe, mildly irritated on her friend’s behalf. “She’s for real.”

“I didn’t mean that to sound insulting, just—” Why the hell was she talking to me? “I didn’t know beauty pageants were still a thing. I thought you were a model, maybe.”

“I’ve done a few ad campaigns, but those were just gigs that came with the title. Besides,” said Nesrin, “Miss Anacreon is a _scholarship_ competition, for the record, not a beauty contest.”

That made the other girls laugh, although I inferred that I should probably not laugh along. Which was fine; sometimes you want to tell a story and laugh about it, but you don’t want your audience to think it’s a big joke. Mostly, I was curious. “But was there a crown? Were you on a parade float?”

Nesrin took the vape back from me to pass along the line again, then got her phone out to find a picture. “Parades, sure. And you better believe there’s a crown.”

“Jesus Christ.” In the picture, the tiara was tall enough to be seen from the cheap seats, like a kokoshnik on a Romanov princess, glittering atop Nesrin’s pumped-up curls. She had tears running down her cheeks, and she was holding an armful of red roses, smiling in the direction of a different camera. “That’s amazing. I’m surprised you could hold your head up under that thing.”

“Over eight hundred brilliant-cut diamonds from Phrixus in a platinum setting. Sitting in a safe in the bank on Anacreon.” She leaned over to flip through a few more pictures while I held the phone, her sleeve rustling against mine. “The one I usually wore to events was all Swarovski, but if little kids asked me if it was real, I’d say it was.”

“Wow.” What a dumb response. I groped for something relevant to say and came up with, “My father’s on Phrixus.”

“Yeah?”

The interrogative yeah. Difficult conversational obstacle, when I couldn’t hear her thoughts. “Yeah, um, it’s not important. We haven’t spoken in years.”

She didn’t know what to do with that any more than I did, but she knew how to be politely sympathetic. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

“It’s no big deal.” I changed the subject, clumsily. “The scholarship must have been huge, right? Was there a talent show, what did you do?”

“I’m a pianist, studying music here at Reg. _But_ that wasn't what I did for talent,” said Nesrin, taking her phone back. “I did a Taekwondo demonstration, because that's a little more memorable. It's different, you know? I'm not an Olympian or anything but I studied it for six years, got to black belt. People like to watch it, which is _not_ true of Bach, unfortunately. There’s no story behind most of my favourite classical pieces, just a key and an opus number. And when there's no story, you lose the audience. I’ve won regional pageants with Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca because that one’s really recognisable and I’m Turkish, but—am I boring you?”

“No, not at all.”

“On a scale of one to ten, how interested are you in my pageant bullshit?”

“Eleven. You’re the first person I’ve met who was ever Miss Anything.”

“But I’ve never met anyone who had a Barany process done, so tell me stuff about you.” The vape had come back our way, and Nesrin lay back on the scaffold to watch the small, cold winter stars, blowing a cloud upward. “You’re like…a psychic? That’s way more interesting. Can you see the future like Barany did or what?”

“No, I’m a telepath. —I can’t hear your thoughts, don’t worry,” I said before she could answer. “Brain implants scramble my signals pretty good.”

“But you can read _other_ people’s thoughts?” Playfully, she held the vape away from me when I reached for it. “Should I even give this to you? What happens when you get a telepath high?”

“He gets hungry and watches stupid movies, just like you.”

“Mm, there’s gotta be more to it than that,” said Nesrin, tugging on my sleeve to make me lie down with her. “What’s it like? Is it depressing?”

“No.” Common question. “Not any more than talking to people. Lots of people are really funny in their private thoughts, actually. Stuff they’d never say out loud. It can be hard not to laugh, if you're at a funeral or a job interview or something.”

“But you’d have to hear what people actually think about _you._ All the time. I couldn’t handle it—like being judged on stage is one thing, but that’s like having social media in your brain. I’d go completely mental.”

“I don’t like hearing that stuff,” I admitted. “But you get used to it. And it saves time. When I meet girls, I know right away what my chances are. Your friends aren’t interested, which is fine. I’m a five on my best day.”

“This _is_ depressing. It’s tragic.” Nesrin was laughing, and she passed me the vape. “You are not a five, okay? Fifty percent of your score is the talent portion, and you have a pretty good one. Twenty percent is the interview, and you’re doing okay. Your poise could be better, but you didn’t have time to prepare. What’s your platform?”

“Am I running for office now?”

“Your pet cause, it’s for social impact. Like if you want to be a cliché you’d say childhood obesity or sustainable terraforming or something. Pick a platform, go. What’s the last thing you donated money to?”

“Epilepsy research.”

“That can totally work. Inspiring story, visiting hospitals, bam. You _are_ cute, you know,” she added, turning onto her side to assess me. “Good jawline. Good lips. I like your eyes, brown eyes can be so good on a guy—but they look sad. I’m not sure I believe you that telepathy isn’t depressing. You know why people think you’re a five?” I thought she would answer this rhetorical question with something abstract like _confidence_, but no. “Bad skin. Wait, smile for me? Let’s see your teeth. Nope, it’s your skin. But you can fix that with a few laser appointments. Minor detail.”

My bad skin is a fact beyond controversy; I appreciated the honesty. It made me laugh, even though I had no idea what was going on. Was this flirting? Should I have been flirting back, or would that just make me seem pathetic? “So I still have a chance to be Miss Ursalia, you’re saying.”

“Go for it.” She smiled at me, and reached across to brush the pad of her thumb over my chin. The movement was deliberate, though her eyes looked uncertain, like a child reaching over the velvet rope to touch a sculpture in a museum—taking a calculated risk. 

This was definitely flirting. 

Even with the skin-to-skin contact, I couldn’t read her. That didn’t make her more intriguing to me or anything; I would have preferred to be able to hear her mind. Her attention was flattering, but I didn’t understand why she was giving it to me. _She could just be making fun of you, you know. Some people don’t outgrow that._

But before I could talk myself out of it, I deployed the one flirtatious stratagem I knew: “You want to get out of here?”

“Mm. And go where?”

“I haven’t thought that far.”

She chuckled and sat up, passing the vape back to Lupe. “Think about it and I’ll see if my girls will let me go.”

* * *

We wandered aimlessly through town, stopping to watch a man flooding a rink in Mitchell Park, which was a lacrosse field during Le Havre’s short-lived summer. The firehose spray arced overhead and sparkled in the halogen light, like a fountain, falling like rain in bright pools on the ice. We stared like stoned idiots and clapped earnestly when the guy was done and started to reel the hose back in. 

From there we found an all-night donair kiosk, where we sat alone at the single wobbly table—all made of a single piece of reinforced plastic, chairs and all, bolted to the floor. One bot behind the counter trundled back and forth between the kitchen door and the delivery exit, but the cook in the kitchen was the only human at work. 

“Do bots think?” Nesrin asked me.

“I’m off the clock, no philosophy.”

“Yeah, but do they?”

I shrugged, peeling the foil back a little further on my donair. “They don’t produce the kind of signals my brain picks up. I don’t really know if that means they don’t think, necessarily.”

Nesrin watched the bot rolling back and forth along its narrow path. “So how would we know, if even you can’t tell?”

“Turing test, I guess. You can always tell when you’re on a customer service call with a bot, right?”

Nesrin grimaced. “I’ve definitely yelled at a real person because I thought she was a bot on the phone.”

“People can fail the Turing test, yeah. If their job is controlling enough. But bots never really pass it.”

“Maybe bots don’t care about convincing us that their thoughts are real.”

“Then we’ll never know, I guess.” It was easier to talk philosophy with people who weren’t majoring in it; I didn’t have to worry about whether I was leaving myself open to a trap. “Wittgenstein had a thought experiment about a beetle in a box. He said to imagine that everybody in society has a box, and they say every box has a beetle in it. But nobody can look into someone else’s box. You can _describe_ the beetle you see in your box, and other people can say, _my beetle’s like that too_, but you’ll never see it. So a box might have anything in it, really. A harmonica, a mousetrap, a dead cat. Or nothing. It doesn't matter, because 'beetle' means whatever’s in the box. What's important is the way we play the beetle game with other people. Robots can’t play the beetle game properly, and that’s all we know.”

“_You_ can look into other boxes, though.”

“Can I, though? Telepathy's just more subjective experience—that's my beetle. I can report what I hear to people, and they can say, ‘yes, that’s what I was thinking.’ But that’s still just the same beetle conversation, isn’t it? Until I check with you, I don’t really _know_ that I’ve read your mind.”

“Oh, c'mon. If you have that conversation a hundred times and each time you’re right—isn’t that what the researchers did with you when you were a kid?”

We had been talking about my childhood of scans and tests, much as I’ve told the story to you. “That’s good enough for scientists, sure. Philosophers are way more neurotic. What if somebody’s immune to telepathy? What if my ability changes? What if I get brain damage? What if my perceptions are unreliable?”

“Nrgh.” Nesrin dropped her chin down on her folded arms, losing interest in the debate. “This _is_ neurotic.”

I clapped my hands a few times to trigger the bot’s attention, and when it rolled over to our table, I fed our garbage into its waiting compactor slot: napkins, foil, cellulose plates. “I hope it can’t think. What a lousy life.”

“It’s okay, bot.” Nesrin patted its case, and it dispensed a couple of plastic-wrapped peppermints along with our receipt. She popped one of the mints in her mouth and put her coat back on. “Let’s go, this place is greasy.”

* * *

I walked Nesrin back to her place, a school residence that had stern signage in the front hall. _Do you know who you’re letting in?_ and _Be considerate to other residents: no guests after hours._ “Is it after hours?” I asked.

“What? Oh, yeah.” She made a dismissive noise. “That’s not a real rule. I have a single room, anyway. Do you want to come in?”

I wasn’t sure, actually. I wanted to see her again, but wasn’t sure I could perform tonight. Still, the correct masculine answer was _yes_, so…maybe I was overthinking it. “Yeah, um, for a minute.”

She grinned, her lower lip between her teeth, and led me down the hall. 

I remembered my first year at Reg, staying in one of these places. I kept fantasising about walking away from it without a word to anyone, leaving campus and wandering off into the woods. Following the train tracks even though I knew they couldn’t lead me home. Lying awake at night, staring at the strip of bright light under my door, or getting up to wander from common room to stairwell to kitchenette. Listening to the machines rumble in the laundry room. Behaving like someone who was desperately lonely, I suppose, but terrified of having to talk to the other students. I couldn’t blame the Neurable, or my father, or Ezra. Just a sad year when nothing fit. 

Nesrin unlocked her door, which had the usual message-board screen mounted on it, with a spray of marabou feathers taped to the end of the stylus. Friends had left scrawled comments and inside jokes, posted sloppy pictures taken in sweaty bars, and linked to videos of kittens. She slapped her palm against the scanner and the Lumen said, “_Welcome home, Nesrin._”

“I’ve been pronouncing your name wrong in my head all this time,” I said, taking my coat and shoes off at the door. “I thought it was like Nes-reen.”

“In Persian it is. In Turkish it’s _Ness_-rin. Rhymes with Catherine.” She sat down on her bed, which was piled high with pillows and extra blankets. “Nesrin Kaya. And it’s just Lev, for you? I remember reading Crime and Punishment in high school and getting really confused by the nicknames…”

I laughed, keeping my voice low even though the walls were thick in these buildings, and sat down on the bed beside her. “You can call me Lyova if you want to, yeah. Since we’ve been hanging out. That’s not too complicated.”

“I can manage that.” She pushed her hair back over her shoulder. “Touching’s okay, right?” she said softly, taking my hands in hers. “I don’t want to…is it overwhelming?”

“No, I just barely…I can tell you’re here,” I murmured, half-closing my eyes as I listened within. “I can sense a mind, but I can’t hear what you’re thinking. It’s not like the bot in the donair kiosk, I promise.”

“What is it like?”

“Have you ever used an old radio? Like not satellite, but terrestrial? They had towers for it on Perdigon, because they’re pretty low-tech out there. I used to be obsessed with those little stations, because they reminded me of listening to minds.” A classic hyperfixation; even now, it was hard to keep myself from rambling about it. “I’d dial through the frequencies late at night, with my friend John, trying to catch the different voices—there was a Spanish-language station somewhere near Hellouin, and a couple of French stations closer to Bonaventure II. But sometimes you’d be going through the static, and you’d almost hear something…like somebody talking in another room. Probably about nothing important, just the weather, but still. They were out there. Sometimes I’d lie there until I fell asleep, listening to these voices I could barely hear in the static, trying to understand what they were saying.”

I don’t think she completely understood, but I felt a surge of something I did recognise—still faint, still indistinct, but familiar. Fondness. She didn’t know me well, and she probably didn’t care about terrestrial radio on Perdigon, but I felt warmth from her anyway. It wasn’t a joke or a trick. She leaned in and kissed me.

It was only the second time I had ever been kissed at all; the first time was out of politeness, on a bad date. After finding out about me, the girl had been terrified that I would manipulate her into sex. I was worried about it too, when I felt the intensity of her fear: _was_ I manipulating her? Would I know, necessarily, if I was doing it?

But I did know that I couldn’t have been manipulating Nesrin, since I could barely feel her. _Bad kisser, though. Probably. You’ve no experience. She’s going to realise this was all a big mistake._

And yet she didn’t pull away, keeping a grip on my collar with one hand, her other hand in my hair. As I turned my body toward hers, she climbed into my lap, straddling my hips. Her mouth tasted of vanilla lip gloss and the peppermint she’d been sucking on. There was no good moment to say, _“I’ve never done this,”_ to warn her that I was liable to take the whole thing far too seriously.

I lost my nerve. “I should go.”

She sat back, tracing a finger down the line of my collar. “You should stay.”

“I have to. But do you—can I call you?”

She smiled and held out her hand for my phone. When I gave it to her, she put her name in my contacts. “Here. Send me something.”

I took my phone back and texted her the last emotionally-neutral emoji I’d used (the taco, to Sciarra), and the notification pinged in her coat pocket. Nesrin Kaya, in my phone and on the record. “Thanks. I really am—this was good,” I said, stumbling. “It was cool to meet you.”

“It was cool to meet you too.” She got up and handed me my coat, tucking a lost glove back into my pocket, holding it out to me. “Safe home, Lyova.”

It began to snow again on the way home. Big kitten-paw flakes, soft and gentle, but building fast. A deep, feathery layer of it settled over the freshly-flooded rink in Mitchell Park. I watched my shadow ripple over the snowbanks as I walked back to the Latin Quarter, thinking that somehow I had changed tonight. Without intending or expecting it. I’d become the kind of person who could get Miss Anacreon’s attention. 


	4. the small face

About Miss Anacreon, before I go on: I know how boring it is to read men describing beauty. Symmetrical faces, anatomically doubtful breasts, maybe a hair colour. _Beautiful women._ Really, I’m trying to spare you. I hear as many female thoughts as male, the thinking and overthinking on both sides, and I know how beauty weighs on women. The hamster wheel of it, the plaster mask of it, colours of the macaw and the peacock, the display and the secrecy. 

Most of all, beauty is a dream, both a shared and private vision. I’ve listened as women catch glimpses of themselves in a mirror, in a shop window, in a distorted selfie, and compare themselves with—and in a flash before the next thought, I catch a glimpse of that woman’s own inward ideal of beauty. Vague, fleeting, contradictory, even repressed, some hidden shining face: a composite of celebrities and fairy-tales and beloved friends. The thing she imagined for herself as a child when she heard stories about _the most beautiful girl in the world._ Helen of Troy, Cleopatra, Vasilissa the Beautiful. Amazons and princesses and witch-queens. Whatever she wants to be. That girl.

Few people dwell on this flicker of pre-thought. They quickly turn to criticism or (less often) to satisfaction. The pores, the shine, the eyeliner with its crooked wing, the second-day hair, the stubble. But sometimes the vision holds, and they see _that girl_. They like what they see, just for now. It never lasts. Hair stops behaving, skin is an eternal work in progress, nails are nothing but a fight against entropy. _I feel cute today_ is rare and sweet. Temporary as a cherry blossom.

And men, even in books, judge beauty so mercilessly. Or they imagine it’s something inherent, rather than the work of a lifetime. Even though men have their own hidden faces, dreams they can’t live up to. But I’ve never felt close to either side.

I know the dread my mother felt when her hair started falling out, the evil whisper: _you were always only good for love and now not even good for that._ I know how my sister used to cry because her friends on the _Judique_ or the _Glooscap_ said she was ugly. Thinking about how she had fallen short of that hidden face within, thinking about how she’d failed _that girl._ I felt ugly too; Dasha looks like me, after all. I heard plenty of shit about my own face in the thoughts of other people, and the negative thoughts tend to stick. Dasha outgrew some of her self-consciousness, but I didn’t.

But even knowing all that, Nesrin’s beauty hit me hard. It hurt. Like standing in a strong wind, it was hard to think of anything else. After a few minutes of talking to her (at least in those early days), I would feel benevolently destroyed by looking at that beauty, eroded like the face of a cliff. It was what Yeats would have called a beauty “high and solitary and most stern”: the firm, dark line of her brows, and her bumpy, aristocratic nose. Her upright carriage, as though someone had taught her early not to hide her height by slouching.

I couldn’t go deeper, I couldn’t get in her head, but God, it wasn’t shallow. Even knowing all that went on later, you have to understand how much it meant for her to look at me.


	5. the court of ashurbanipal

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lev's sister Dasha has bad news about their father; Nesrin comes over to lend him a listening ear.

I woke up in the middle of the weekend. Passed out dead for hours on my rich-boy mattress in the empty attic. It was dark outside, of course, and for a minute or two I tried to guess what time it was. Someone was watching TV downstairs, but no cooking smells or microwave beeps came from the kitchen. Late afternoon, maybe. The sky was still deep cobalt blue, so the sun had only just gone down. My windows were full of snow in exponential-function lines, like on a Christmas card.

“Lumen, time?”

“It’s 4:30 pm.”

As I sat up, the Lumen turned the lights on to a soothing pink colour and started to gently read the news. That was its usual behaviour after I’d had a seizure, so I wondered if it knew something I didn’t. “Happy weekend, Lev. It’s Saturday, September 7th, 2120. Did you know that Queen Elizabeth I was born on this day in 1533? In Le Havre, temperatures today are hovering around freezing and snow is expected to continue off and on through the night. ODH coltan miners continue to strike in—”

“Stop.” Sometimes I felt guilty for speaking too sharply to the Lumen, as though it made me the moral equivalent of guys who boss waiters around. But it was also embarrassing to talk to it like a person. Alone on a weekend and holding animated conversations with the AI. That kind of thing went along with rescuing too many feral cats and drinking homemade wine from a kit. “Lumen Sleepsafe report, please.”

“Sure thing. We detected two minor events while you were asleep. Would you like to view them?”

“Ugh. Yeah.” I reached for my water bottle and drained it while the Lumen loaded the video and projected it on the wall. 

Sometimes these were nothing; the software didn’t always interpret my movements right, and sometimes the camera would trigger when I was tossing and turning. In fact, I often dismissed reports of ‘minor events’ without checking, if I didn’t feel bad. 

But the first clip _was_ an event, all right. In the low-res video, I saw myself suddenly sit upright, face blank, and stare around the room. Picking at my shirt, the bedclothes, plucking at something invisible. It only lasted for a minute and a half, and then I lay down again. 

The second clip looked innocent; it looked like a normal hypnic jerk to me, two hours after the first. 

“Uh, let’s…save both of those, just in case,” I told the Lumen. “Forward to Hôpital Jean-Talon, Neurology, tagged for Dr. O’Meara.”

The Lumen closed the video display. “Okay, Lev. Let’s log your symptoms. How are you feeling today?”

“Not _that_ bad?” These comments would go to Dr. O’Meara, so I could talk like a human. “Um, a little nausea. The Lumen didn’t catch any convulsions, I haven’t bitten my tongue, everything’s dry. But my muscles hurt like they do after a tonic-clonic. Clear head, but I feel a little gross. Any fever?”

“Your temperature is 38.4 degrees Celsius,” the Lumen confirmed. “That’s a low-grade fever, so you might want to take it easy today.”

“Huh.” Couldn’t quite account for that. I opened my nightstand drawer to find some ibuprofen and my daily meds. “Maybe the flu. Or the greasy kiosk food, if the nausea gets worse. Okay, comments done, send report.”

“Your privacy is important to us. Voiceprint is a match, but please confirm your identity using a thumbprint scan—report sent.” The Lumen interrupted itself when I ran my thumb over the sensor in my phone. “Can I do anything else for you, Lev?”

“Not now.” I popped the tablets and swallowed the last of my water. Having been informed that I really was measurably under the weather and not simply thick from sleep, I was starting to feel worse. What a dumb feedback loop. “I guess, anyway. No, I should get food, I should eat something…”

“Would you like me to order food for you? It should arrive at your usual time—”

“Yeah. Just get one veg bento from Sapporo, please.” My go-to when my stomach felt bad, always easy to eat. “Kettle on too.”

The kettle clicked and began to hiss softly as it heated up. I checked my phone. Nesrin’s number was still there; she’d entered herself into my contacts as Miss Anacreon, which made me smile. 

There was also a voice message from my sister: “It’s me. I just got back from seeing Dad. Call me when you get this, okay? It’s important.”

I didn’t want to hear any news about my father, but the Lumen had picked up on the words _call me_ and _important_, so it said, “Would you like to call back now?”

“No, but—yeah, fine, call her,” I said, resigned. 

“Calling Darya Mozerskaya.”

Dasha picked up the call as a video chat, and her projection appeared on the wall. She had last night’s smudged mascara under her eyes, although her time zone was a few hours ahead of mine—early evening in New Jakarta on Nephele. Dasha looked like me in the broad strokes, with our father’s Roman nose and dark colouring, and she used to sport a severe pixie cut that made people ask if we were twins. She was growing it out again now, the wisps of her shaggy bangs pinned back out of her face.

“You look like shit,” she remarked when the connection went through. She was eating ramen while holding the fork gingerly because her nail polish was still wet. “Are you okay?”

“I think so. I had an event last night. While I was asleep.”

“Nocturnal seizures? That’s different.” Dasha worried about me, and liked to get frequent updates so that she could second-guess my doctors. “How bad? Were you drinking last night or something?”

“_No_, I was good. The video looked like focal impaired awareness, just some picking at the blankets and then back to sleep.”

“Huh. But you were up late, right?”

“I met a girl.”

“Can’t mess with the sleep schedule, dude, I don’t know when you’re gonna learn.”

“Yeah, go ahead and scold me for that when you’re hungover.”

“Listen, I…might be.” She had an evil-looking khaki green smoothie in a clear plastic thermos, and she took a resolute swig from it before pushing the empty ramen bowl aside. “Your argument _may_ have some validity, but I couldn’t possibly speculate. Who’s the girl, though?”

“She’s a friend of my housemate’s, her name’s Nesrin. She was Miss Anacreon a couple of years ago.”

Dasha snorted, but looked away from the camera to type in a search query. When she found a picture, her expression changed. “_Whoa._”

“Right?”

“_Her?_”

“Yeah, _her._”

Dasha let out a long, low whistle. “She’s gorgeous, damn. Way too hot for you.”

“I know. We talked last night and took a walk, we got donairs and then went back to her place.”

Dasha mouthed _whaaaaat_ silently, feigning speechless shock, and she picked up her ugly smoothie again. “Good for you, man. How is she with the telepathy thing?”

“She didn’t seem freaked out about it, when I told her. I can’t hear her mind, though. She’s got a medical implant.”

“Oh, no shit?” She forced another swallow of the smoothie. “That must be neat.”

“_No_, it’s confusing. It took me way too long to even figure out that she was flirting.” My kettle was boiling. I poured it out into the pot, the lid clinking into place. “How’s it going on Nephele? You’re hungover, you’re drinking garden clippings, and what else?”

“No, this is some herbal stuff my friend swears by—it’s not for hangovers, but I feel like I’m getting this disgusting virus that’s been ripping through the city. Death flu. I’d probably drink this for a hangover too, though. It has that hangover remedy quality. Punitive, you know?”

“What’s it taste like?”

“Like feces, I’m not kidding. I think there’s valerian in it, that has a very poopy aroma. What’s that chemical in jasmine and orange blossom that smells like baby shit? Something indolic. Sciarra would know, if he was here. It’s got local honey it, from the Agricultural Ring, but that doesn’t help the taste. The green stuff is pureed raw spinach for vitamin C, it’s…whatever, it’s fine.” But she pushed the thermos away, even though a quarter of it was left. “I always get sick when I set foot in a spaceport.”

“Me too. So what’s going on with Dad?”

Dasha drew in a long breath between her teeth. “You should really go see him, Lyova.”

As I’d told Nesrin, I hadn’t spoken to my father in years. Not because I’d made a conscious decision about it—nothing so dramatic. It was just easiest to try to forget about him. My mother signed my name on the cards she sent him for New Year’s and his birthday; once, I sent him a personal card on Father’s Day, because I was feeling contemplative and guilty. This was like leaving sugar on a countertop and getting ants: he started to pester me with text and voice messages, asking me to intervene for him with prison authorities, complaining about his ailments, freestyling lies about the appeals process and a plan to run for public office after his release. Once, he threatened something dark if I didn’t respond. I couldn’t tell whether he meant suicide or some external violence—both seemed implausible—but I forwarded the message to Dasha and she handled it.

Which was cowardly, of course. But Dasha didn’t have clear memories of living in the same house with our father, and she wanted that connection with him. She visited willingly, and published a series of articles online about the emotional journey of getting to know her narcissistic, incarcerated father. She won an award for them.

“I’ve kinda got a streak going where I leave Dad alone and he leaves me alone,” I said. “Probably that’s best for both of us.”

“Then do what’s best,” she said in her therapist voice. “But like—I don’t want to scare you, but the opportunities to see him might be drying up soon.”

“Why?”

“I think he’s really sick this time.”

My father was a renowned malingerer, with the complication of having genuinely lousy health. He’d suffered two strokes in prison, and several more imaginary strokes. “He just likes it better in the infirmary.”

“Well, he probably does. I would too. But he’s old. When you lie about being sick, it’ll come true eventually—that’s how things work.” Dasha stirred the mulchy stuff in her thermos with the thick glass straw. “You know I’m not even that close to him, but it was sad for me to see him that way. You should really go. Mama got back from a visit last week.”

I sighed. “Fine, okay. How sick are we talking about? Should I like…prepare myself?”

“He’s dropped a lot of weight. He says he can’t eat.”

“Even if you brought him special food? Sometimes that’s what he’s angling for.”

“I brought him pastries from Corsetti’s. He didn’t care. I don’t think he’s angling for anything this time. He’s sick, it’s for real. I tried to get in touch with his doctor there, but of course you know that’s a nightmare.”

“Right.” I wished then that I had gone ahead with a dramatic no-contact policy instead of waffling and hiding and sending one-off Father’s Day cards. Then I would have had an established policy. Instead I just had a preference, and if my father was sick and dying, a preference wasn’t enough. “All right, I’ll…fine, I’ll get a ticket to Phrixus. I can go next weekend, I guess. Unless it’s…like, it’s not an _emergency_, yeah?”

“Not yet. I don’t think. But that’s good, Lyova, I think you should go. For yourself, not for him,” said Dasha. “You don’t have to cry and forgive him for everything, you know? Be there, witness the moment.”

“Yeah, yeah.” I opened my laptop and pulled up the site for the spaceport at Le Havre. “I’ll go. Before I hang up though, can you—one more thing about Nesrin. Is it, like…is it weird to leave in the middle of making out?”

Dasha closed her eyes for a second. “Yes, it’s weird, _chaynik_.” It meant an inexperienced idiot, literally a teakettle, noisy and shiny and dumb. “What the hell, what’d you leave for?”

“I panicked.”

“Then text her now, or she’ll think she did something wrong and you don’t like her. She’ll think her breath is disgusting. Or at least that’s what I’d think.”

“Good, that’s all I wanted to know.” I picked up my phone to start the lengthy process of composing a two-word text. “Thanks.”

* * *

When I had said goodnight to Dasha, I hit send on my meticulously constructed text to Nesrin: _what’s up?_

She left me on read for about fifteen minutes, which I might have deserved, and then replied: _not much, you?_

_Sorry I left suddenly last night,_ I texted back. _I didn’t mean to be weird, I was nervous._

_It’s okay,_ she replied. I couldn’t read her thoughts, of course, but I could still sense (from the length of the pause, the typing indicator blinking a little too long) that it wasn’t completely okay. _Why nervous?_

Might as well be blunt. _Dating’s always been a little fraught for me. Because of the brain stuff._

Very quick reply; she was annoyed, maybe. _I asked if touching was okay. Sorry if that wasn’t enough._

_It wasn’t anything you did._ The Lumen sounded a delivery notification—my food from Sapporo—so I brought my phone downstairs with me to get my food from the drone. Hoping not to see my roommates, I scuttled back up to my attic with the bag, texting as I climbed the stairs. _It was dumb, I felt like I’d be disappointing._

Pause. _Really?_ Then, _Can we talk on voice? This is awkward._

With the attic door closed behind me, I switched to the voice channel and waited for her to accept the connection. When she picked up, I said, “Yes, really.”

“I’ve been wondering all day what your deal was,” Nesrin said. I heard a faint rustle of the mic against cloth. “You seemed so into it, and then you bolted. Like you were grossed out.”

“I wasn’t grossed out—Christ, you’re the most beautiful girl I’ve ever met. It’s hard, that’s all.” I sat down on the floor with my disposable bento box, cradling the phone with my shoulder. “It’s been…I dunno, awhile. Since I dated anyone.”

“How come?”

“Not a lot of relationships last very long, when you know everything the other person’s thinking,” I said. “The things they think and don’t say. The balance is out of whack from the start. Then they worry that maybe I’m making them do things, that they only _think_ they want me.”

“Can you even do that?” Nesrin asked, after a slight pause. “Make people feel whatever you want them to feel?”

“I can’t with you.”

“But with other people?” 

“Yeah. I could.” I was fidgeting with the chopsticks, which I hadn’t yet pulled apart. “But I don’t. And I wouldn’t.” 

“Hey.” Her voice softened. “I’m not running away screaming, okay? We’re talking, it’s fine.” She was quiet for a moment. “Are you okay tonight, Lev? You seem…I don’t know.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Not happy. You wouldn’t have disappointed me last night, you know,” she said. “You came across like a nice, geeky guy. Smart and weird. Cute in the face. That’s all I was expecting. I think you could clear that bar.”

“Sorry, yeah. I’m making a big deal over nothing. I do that a lot. Just to warn you,” I said, embarrassed at myself but also warmed by the thought that she saw me that way. Weird, smart and cute. I’d take it. “But to answer your question—which I’d love to do, I’d love to talk about anything else besides my goddamn brain—I’m a little under the weather tonight. And my dad is…whatever, I have to go see him next week.”

“Fancy galactic spacefarer.” I could hear her smile in her voice. “Did you tell me he was living on Keto?”

“Phrixus.” I felt pathetic, lying by omission, so I said, “He’s in prison there. White-collar stuff, it happened a long time ago. My sister says his health isn’t so great, so I have to go make an appearance.”

“Oh my God. Lev.”

“It’s fine.” I cracked the chopsticks apart. Satisfying. “He pulls this deathbed routine every so often.”

“Can I come over?”

“You don’t have to.”

“No, but I’d like to,” she said. Soft. As if she already cared about me. “If company would help. We can talk. Or watch movies, or study, whatever.”

I didn’t know if company _would_ help, but I did want to see her again. “Are you serious or is this like…”

“What?”

“I don’t know. Pity?”

She must have been eating too, because I heard the crackle of a straw in a fountain drink that was down to the crushed ice. Her voice was low and level when she answered. “Why should I pity you?”

I didn’t have a ready answer, or rather the one that did immediately come to mind sounded stupid. Stupid enough that I couldn’t take myself seriously. “Because I’m a creep?” I did a bad Thom Yorke falsetto, like the old song. “_I’m a weirdo…_”

I could practically hear her roll her eyes. “That is a cheesy answer and I do not accept it. Do you want to be alone or should I come over, c’mon? Make up your mind, tick-tock.”

“Come over,” I said right away. “Please.”

“Then I’ll see you in a few.”

* * *

Half an hour later, Nesrin arrived on my doorstep, flushed from the cold, snowflakes in her dark hair. God, that beauty queen smile. I’d spent too long last night looking through her photos on social media, flipping from picture to picture on my phone in the dark before I fell asleep. It was a great smile even when it was obviously fake, because it shone with pride: _you haven’t made me happy, not really, but I make myself happy, so I can smile at you._ But when it was sincere, it made my chest ache. A birthday cake smile. As if nothing could make her happier than looking at me.

She brought me _kuru fasulye_, which she said was “Turkish comfort food”, a container of white beans in tomato sauce. I put it away in the freezer—when I ate it later that night, it tasted more familiar than I’d expected, almost like Georgian food. 

We went upstairs to my room, and shut the door on all my housemates.

“I’ve never dated a guy with such a clean room,” said Nesrin, plopping down in my desk chair and rolling it across the bare floor, checking out my bookshelves. “You could do surgery in here. What’s this statue, are you Buddhist?”

“Sort of, yeah.” A question I was never sure how to answer. “That’s Bhaisajyaguru, the Medicine Buddha. Who heals people, obviously. We used to spend time at the Buddhist abbey on Perdigon because I was learning meditation with the monks there. Ezra’s suggestion. When I finished my first summer with them, I was going through a rough time with seizures, so the abbess taught me the mantra and the sadhana, and she gave me the statue.”

“That’s sweet.” The lapis-blue statue sat on the highest shelf, and Nesrin sat with the chair tilted back to look up at it. “I’d go crazy trying to meditate for more than ten minutes. My mind would always wander when my parents took me to the mosque in Mardin, on Earth. Even when there was literally nothing else in front of me to think about, I’d get obsessed with the lines on the prayer rugs. Following the lines around and around. Then on Anacreon we started going to a new mosque and this place had absolutely plain carpet. Like, on purpose! Specifically to keep you from getting distracted! They were on to me. Nothing but a sea of salmon pink carpet. I wanted to cry.” 

I laughed. “You had carpet? With fibres and everything? Some people have all the luck, I was looking at a blank wall.”

“You used to _dream_ of salmon pink carpet…” She rolled the chair back towards the washstand, which was built into the wall in the style of old colonial housing—each room had one, in order to cut down on morning traffic to the single full bathroom. My toiletries were lined up on the ledge above the sink, and she stopped to survey them. “You have eyeliner, oh my God—I didn’t get that vibe from you last night at all, I love it.”

“Last night I just rolled out of bed and came downstairs,” I said. My father’s vanity had always caused me second-hand embarrassment, and I didn’t like to admit to it in myself. Especially since the results always disappointed me. “I wasn’t being fancy. And I only do fancy once in a blue moon, so don’t get too excited.”

“Shan’t,” she said primly, then looked over her shoulder at me. “Can I do your makeup tonight? Just for fun? You have such good eyelashes…”

“Um...” Blushing like an idiot now. But I had ducked intimacy last night, and regretted it, so tonight I gave in: I wanted to put myself in her hands. “You can, yeah, that’s okay…”

She made a dorky little squeak of delight and got up to get her purse. “I love doing other people’s faces, I’m sorry—okay, wash your face first and then sit on the bed, I’ll bring the chair closer.” As I was lathering up in the sink, she asked, “I don’t have your pronouns wrong, do I? Lupe called you he.”

“That’s fine.” I rinsed my face off, raking my damp hair back from my forehead. “Being put in the guy category doesn’t disturb me, even though—I mean, I don’t feel like either one. Not completely. And sometimes it’s hard to…” I hesitated, choosing my words, as I came to sit down on the bed. “To make that legible.”

“How come?” Nesrin had the contents of her bag spilled out in her lap, along with my few sundries. She moved close so that her knees bumped mine, then opened her thighs to move closer, taking my face in her fingers and turning it toward the light. “It’s 2120, most people don’t care about—ha. Youuu…already know what people care about, I forgot.”

I smiled. “I do. But it’s not about judgement.” I was quiet while she massaged my moisturizer in, and then said, “It’s more that…people don’t see this in me unless I point it out. You know? And then I feel like, how real can it be if it only seems to exist when I use a kohl pencil?”

She pressed her lips together, thinking as she rummaged through the products in her lap. “I mean, guilty. I didn’t know. But the rest of us need clues to figure out how people work, Lyova. Don’t blame the kohl.” 

“I guess.”

“Which is classic, very Pharaonic. Maybe I’ll do a whole look around that, like, it’s 600 B.C., the king of Assyria is receiving an intriguing visitor from the Scythian steppes, the whole court is losing their minds over this highlight…” She chose a primer and began working it into my skin. “And you’re lighter than me but we have the same undertones so I can use my foundation palette, bonus.”

“I get that from my dad. My grandmother was from Tabriz, she was Azerbaijani.”

“Shut the front door.” She smiled, mixing some colour on the back of her hand with her fingers. “Do you speak the language? It’s supposed to be so close to Turkish.”

“I never met her. Or any of my dad’s family,” I said, closing my eyes as her fingers travelled delicately across my face, spreading and blending the colour. “They were gone before I was born. My mom was his second marriage, it was late.”

“That’s too bad. Tell me about him?”

“But we’re having such a nice time.”

“Wait’ll I start threading your eyebrows, chump.” She widened her eyes at me, mock-threatening. “No, I’ll be good, I won’t disturb the architecture. I’m super close to my dad,” she went on, switching to a different palette. “My Baba’s sweet. He owns a car rental place in Liberty, Anacreon. Corporate hellhole. My parents were barely making ends meet when my father had to have surgery—he’d been rationing his insulin and the doctors said he was this close to losing his foot. I was sixteen, so I ran a fundraiser online. My first one. Livestreaming about eight, nine hours a day for donations.”

“Jesus. Livestreaming what, what were you doing?”

“Oh, you know. ‘My real life,’” said Nesrin, shaping the inverted commas with her fingers, still smeared with concealer. “Putting on my makeup in the morning, doing weird hairstyles, playing games, talking to people in the chat, practicing Taekwondo or piano, taking dares if they gave donations—I ate a whole jar of mayonnaise on camera once. I had to go out and _buy_ the mayonnaise, because chat said it wouldn’t count if it wasn’t a full jar.”

I was trying not to laugh, while she blended out the worst of my bad skin. “How much did you get for that?”

“Sixty credits from the person who dared me, and another two hundred from other people in chat who were cheering me on. And it took about forty-five minutes to finish the jar, so not bad as hourly pay. Then I threw up and got another hundred, people felt bad for me.”

“I guess I’d eat a jar of mayonnaise for that kind of money too. But fuck, that’s a _nightmare._”

She shrugged. “Yeah. But I saved my Baba’s foot.” She sat back in the chair to check for missed spots, then leaned forward again, contouring my cheekbones. “You don’t get along with your dad, huh? We don’t have to talk about it. I just thought that since you were going to see him…”

“No, it’s fine, he’s…I don’t know.” I closed my eyes again, thinking about where to even start. With the basics, maybe. “He used to be CEO of a biotech company, Nestling Labs. Not a scientist himself, his degree was in economics or something. Ezra Barany came to him with this patent on a genetic engineering process, and my father agreed to develop it. Because he wanted a special kid, basically. —That sounds a little too cynical,” I added. “He wanted the best for me.”

“You can be cynical, I don’t mind.”

“No, I’m trying to be…I’m trying.” Her touch was making me relax, because I could sense her mind at work, muffled and disrupted by the interference of the medi-port, but present. Real. The murmurs of a neighbour through a wall, the whistling signal of a distant radio station. “I’d just started lessons with Ezra. Six years old. My father used to—he used to ask me for help. With business things. To make a client like him better, to make an investor feel more confident, to make colleagues want to sign contracts.”

“How did you even do that?” She began to work on my eyelids, sweeping primer across them with the warm pad of her ring finger. “Did you know what a contract was, at that age?”

“Not really. Papers that my father wanted signed. But I didn’t need to understand—kids don’t know business, but they know how to wheedle adults,” I said. “When you’re listening to someone’s thoughts, you can tell if they want to say yes or no to something. You can feel what’s important, what they gloss over, what they’re afraid of, what they’re hoping for. You do it quietly, you use their own words, you reassure them. Everything will be fine if they just do this one favour. You choose your battles. A lot of these guys thought my dad was a scumbag, which made good cover, so I’d let them keep thinking it unless I absolutely had to change it.”

When I opened my eyes again, Nesrin was watching me intently, her eyes grave. I loved the colour of them so much that I felt greedy and self-indulgent when I met her gaze—the light-filled green of a freshwater pearl. “Did you ever get caught?” she asked.

“Not quite. My father’s assistant, Sergei, he finally reported it. He did it for me, he felt sorry for me, and I never even thanked him—” I stopped, swallowing, and looked upward when she leaned in close again to line my lower lid. “It was the right thing to do but it ruined Mama’s life. All our lives. I had to testify against my father, and Mama nearly lost everything, she had to raise us alone. My sister was only a baby, she grew up without knowing Dad at all. Which was probably a good thing, but…I mean, she wanted him, she wanted a father.”

“Of course she did.” Nesrin moved to my other eye, then stopped to sharpen the pencil. “You did too, right?”

_No_ was the answer, but I softened it. “I had Ezra. And Jacob Roth, his husband, the two of them did most of the dad stuff for me. We spent summers at the abbey on Perdigon, they taught me to catch frogs, stuff like that. Jacob’s the only reason I passed my high school math courses, when I was living in Chicago. I’d call him on longsat every night with homework questions. And Ezra played chess with me—a precog versus a telepath, it was pretty much the only way we could play fair. He’d let me win, when I deserved it.”

“Chess club aesthetic, I love that for you.” She pulled my eyelid up a little to get deep into the lashline. “But still. They weren’t your father.”

“I cut him off myself, it was my choice.” I was flinchy with the pencil so close, trying to keep still for her and not blink. “Even from prison, he was manipulative—he’d lie about the stupidest stuff, or he’d start family drama for attention. I didn’t like visiting him. I don’t like _him_. I love him, I _want_ to love him, but I don’t like him.” I sat back from Nesrin to give myself some space for a moment, nearly rubbing my eye and stopping at the last second. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this, I don’t usually talk about it…”

“Because I asked.” She let her hand rest on my knee, stroking lightly, as if I were a nervy horse. “Is it too much, am I being nosy?”

“No. It’s fine.” I straightened up and let her continue. “So that’s the story. He used me when I didn’t know any better, he went to prison on Phrixus, and he’s sick so I have to go see him.”

“I’m so sorry.” Nesrin began to brush out my brows, filling them in with a bit of powder. “Look straight ahead—okay, yup, we’re still even. That’s a long prison sentence for white-collar stuff, or at least it would be where I come from. If he’d been from Anacreon they would’ve given him a medal.”

“They threw the book at him. Nobody on the jury liked the idea of fraud via telepath.”

“Well, good. But that’s so rough on your family—you never wanted the company yourself, right?” she said, poking through her pile of compacts and tubes. “You don’t seem too interested in taking up the family business.”

I snorted. “Holy shit, no. I couldn’t run a biotech company, are you crazy? I’ve been offered jobs by other companies—Telekit really wanted me last year. Jacob said it was a bad idea, and Ezra said it was a _really_ bad idea, so I turned it down. Anyway, that’s…like, if anything, the family business is the school on Perdigon. Mount Hellouin.” That much was well-known, and safe to say; some details about Hellouin were open secrets in the psionics field, but we were careful about security. “Ezra wants me to go back there and teach, eventually. Which I probably will.”

“You sound so pumped,” Nesrin said dryly. “The passion, the enthusiasm, my God, what a firebrand…”

“Look, I _am_ passionate about it. It’s just intimidating.”

“Why’s that?”

“I’ll show you when we’re done here. Are we close?”

“Very. I don’t think I need to do your lips for this, they have lots of natural colour. We’re putting all the drama on the eyes. In fact,” she said, picking up a pan of shadow, “I wasn’t going to do a colour on the lids but I changed my mind, so let’s see if I can do this without smudging the line…”

“Don’t do anything weird.” 

“Shh. The Medicine Buddha inspired me, I want to try a pop of blue. Wash it off if you don’t like it.” She dusted it over my eyelids, brushed her thumb over my lower lip, and grinned. “Gorgeous, _ nazar değmesin_. And that’s how you wow them at Ashurbanipal’s court. Here, look.”

She handed me her folding mirror, and I opened it. Nesrin had done a good job, of course; the lapis-blue shadow was bolder than anything I would wear in real life, but it conveyed the mood she’d described, rich and regal. Stylised like a tomb painting, and yet I could see in my reflection a glimpse of that hidden face. It worked. “This is really—my skin looks so good, wow…”

“Primer’s your friend. I know it’s a heightened look, the eyes aren’t exactly streetwear, but—”

“No, it’s amazing. I could never in a million years do this for myself, but thank you.”

She made a moue. “Don’t say that, practice makes perfect. In a few years you’ll be doing flawless cut creases for lectures at Hellouin, wait and see.”

I laughed and got up from the bed to kneel beside it. “You overestimate me. C’mon, I’ll show you.”

The cheap flatpack frame had drawers underneath it, and one of these drawers I pulled out to show Nesrin a locked box. Fireproof, meant for documents. I keyed in the code to open it. Reams of paper, so much that the box could barely stay closed. 

“What’s this?” Nesrin asked, sitting on the floor beside me.

“The future of psionics, if I can ever pull my shit together.” I gathered the papers up in my hands. Bound notebooks, faded printouts, loose-leaf covered in my awful handwriting, the margins full of doodles. Held together by staples, paperclips, rubber bands, and here and there a plastic report cover or a manila folder. “Eighteen years’ worth of notes from Hellouin—we never threw anything out, and we never put anything in the cloud. Techniques, exercises…some of this was from the abbey, all this is for dream manipulation…”

“_Dream_ manipulation, are you for real?” Nesrin peered over my shoulder, then looked back up at me. “Can I read it? Should you even be showing this to me, is the wizards’ union gonna be mad?”

“It’s all pretty obscure.” I showed her a page of my notes, written when I was maybe fifteen. 

> _A dog afraid of thunder._  

> 
>   1. Dumbshow
>   2. Lotuseater
>   3. Lightningrod
>   4. Weathermaker
> 
>   
Constant flight from the world. Gather clouds. Put a little English on it. Fill the sky with smoke.

Nesrin was frowning at the page, and reached out to run her fingertips over the words—my pen had pressed too hard on the paper, incising the letters deeply. Halfway down the page I had switched to Russian, and my tangled, looping Cyrillic was even less legible. “Are these code phrases?”

“Not really. They’re reminders for me, I know the context. Sometimes Ezra used stories or—almost like koans, to get certain concepts across. Because otherwise, they’re not easy to describe. But that’s what I worry about. Ezra’s not going to be here forever, so I’m going to have to turn all this weird crap into a teaching system.”

“Why’s it all on you?” she asked. “Weren’t there any other students?”

“A few. John Sciarra and the Metaxas twins were the only ones who made it all the way through the program. Lots of the early Barany process kids turned out to have pretty weak abilities, or else they didn’t have much range or flexibility. Ezra says that’s changing, the next generation will be stronger. And…well, Sciarra’s in med school now, and the twins have been AWOL for awhile. I don’t think they ever planned to take over Hellouin—everyone always figured it would be me.”

“But is that what you want? Really?”

I hesitated, because it was a future I couldn’t quite picture. Not that I could imagine much else for myself. Ezra had always flatly refused to make any prophecies about my future, which was no doubt a wise pedagogical decision, but it was hard to keep secrets from me. From what little I could glean, there was _something_ he was afraid I might do. Like my mother, he worried about what I might become.

So sue me if I was scared to make big decisions. Spending five years at Regiopolis on a philosophy degree was a stalling tactic. Maybe I was useless, but at least I wasn’t doing any harm.

“I don’t know,” I said, putting the Hellouin papers back in the box. “But I spend so much time trying _not_ to use this ability, you know? There must be something good I can do with it.”

“You’ll figure it out, Lyova,” said Nesrin, and she leaned close to kiss me softly. “There’s time.”

* * *

We spent the rest of that night watching movies, losing interest halfway through, getting wrapped up in each other. I fell asleep with my head in her lap, waking up bleary when she touched my forehead to wake me. _Shh, it’s okay, I’m going home. We’ll talk tomorrow, sleep well._

The next morning, I woke up right where she left me, aching and cramped from sleeping in my clothes, my eyes blackened by her smeared lines. The hidden face was gone.


	6. house of the dead

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lev visits his father in prison, and it does not go well.

On Phrixus, the following weekend, I got off the ship and wandered through the spaceport, dreamy from the drugs. Meds for anxiety, for nausea, and a mysterious prophylactic with a long name that I took to prevent migraines. All of these together made the world seem spongey and permeable, the thoughts of other travellers spilling into my head. And out of it again. In and out. 

My memories are disjointed.

In the gift shop, I thought of buying something for Nesrin. They had a lot of tumbled stones and mineral specimens—rough, raw diamonds in shades of brown and muddy yellow. Low quality, not expensive, just a curiosity. But diamonds were diamonds, and I didn’t want to imply anything weird. Instead, I chose a chunky spear of a pinkish violet mineral called phrixalite, because it was pretty and because the card describing the “metaphysical properties” said it promoted telepathic connection. 

The bullet train didn’t have a stop at Canaan Correctional Colony, so I had to go past it to Stornoway Mine and then take a slower train southeast to the prison. Siberia. Phrixus was cold, though not as cold as Ursalia, and hadn’t developed much native life beyond some bacteria and algae. But it had atmosphere, water, and thin, rocky soil—a better starting point than many less habitable planets. So the terraformers had brought plants from Earth, building a carefully planned ecosystem that still failed every few years: floods, droughts, invasive species running amok. From the train, I could see clouds of smoke in the distance, a controlled burn in the spindly forest of stunted spruces and pines.

I didn’t want to think about myself so I listened to other minds. Behind me, a man was asleep and dreaming about witch trials, talk show hosts, an abandoned school, a flock of chickens, and a broken staircase. The man was trying to smuggle contraband past sentries and guardians. Getting away with it, but the sentries only got bigger, beside doors that kept getting smaller. A package wrapped in cloth and paper, tucked inside his coat, next to his heart, warmed by his body heat. So important that it was almost alive. Pulsating, needy. He opened the package once, but there was nothing inside. Gone, all gone, nothing left but streaks of something shiny, like oil…

Curious about how it would end, I listened to the dream until its signal guttered and brightened into conscious thought. The man awoke when his forehead knocked against the window, and he forgot the whole tale. 

He forgot it, but I remembered. Even now, writing this to you, I still remember. So whose dream was it really?

They opened my bag at Canaan’s security checkpoint. A woman with a bluff, aggressively friendly manner like a gym teacher opened my carry-on and removed each item inside. Pried the case off my phone, flipped through my book (_Franny and Zooey_, for an English elective) to look for cash between the leaves. Held my travel kit hostage until I returned, lest I use my ounces of soap and shampoo for something nefarious. She pushed my half-emptied bag down the conveyer belt, with my coat and shoes. The machine beeped, and that took her attention away from what I’d said.

It was a serious beep: two other C.O.’s appeared to flank me, with that attitude of alert boredom that cops and prison guards like to display. 

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

A supervisor was looking over the first guard’s shoulder at the scanner display. “Just a few more minutes, sir. All your devices are powered off, correct?”

“That’s what the sign said to do. Yes, yeah, everything’s turned off.”

“Absolutely everything?” said the supervisor. He looked exhausted and from the sound of his thoughts, he was having a terrible day. His nametag read Wu. “Does the luggage have a tracker built in?”

“I disabled that.” As an absent-minded kid, I’d lost a lot of luggage, so I always paid extra for the tracking device when I was buying a bag. “Look, I use one of these—” I showed them the fob on my keychain, a red button for toggling all your tech on or off in spaceports. The back had a sticker, worn thin, listing everything it controlled. “Phone, laptop, luggage tracker, watch, emergency beacon, toothbrush—”

“Understood, sir. Is it possible that something got stuck in the seams?”

“I really don’t think so.”

“Do you have any subcutaneous implants that you didn’t list on the security check form?”

“No.” The first guard was waving a wand scanner around through my personal space. “I don’t even know what—subcutaneous is under the skin, right?”

“Correct.” Wu was still hunched over his console, brushing his fingers across the screen to page backward through my file. He was expecting to find dishonesty, thinking that the inmates and their families were cut from the same cloth. “Who are you here to see?”

That information was right in front of him, but I knew that questions like this were more about seeing if I could stay calm, obey commands, and keep my story straight. “Anton Mozersky, he’s my father.”

“Oh, so you’re Lev Mozersky,” said Wu, as if this explained something. He’d been given instructions about me, and at the moment couldn’t recall them, so he was vamping while he pulled up the correct file. “Right, well. Your possessions will go through that machine there, and any tech that’s not disabled will rendered inoperative. Permanently bricked. If there’s anything you’ve forgotten, now’s the time to tell us about it.”

“You can give me the waiver. I don’t know why the machine’s going off. Sorry,” I added, because the guards were relaxing, their alertness decaying into annoyance. Another waste of time. 

“Hang on, I think I found it,” said the first guard, with the wand scanner. It was beeping at a spot on my left thigh. “Did you empty your pockets completely, sir?”

“_Yes,_ look—” I pulled my pockets inside out for them, like a Depression-era cartoon of a broke farmer. _Empty as a ragpicker’s pocket._ “Nothing.”

“Unfortunately, sir, because the scanner has gone off, we now have a reasonable suspicion that you may be carrying a contraband device into the facility,” the guard recited. “You are not under arrest and are free to leave, but you may not continue past this point unless you agree to a more thorough search. This would include removal of clothing in a private area in front of a corrections officer of the same gender.”

“Jesus Christ—sorry, sorry,” I said. No outward expressions of frustration in front of the guards. I wanted to say _just forget it then_ and go back to the train station, but I’d come this far. Ridiculous to turn around and spend the rest of my weekend schlepping back to Ursalia for nothing. “All right, fine, let’s do it.”

Wu brought me to a small, featureless room, furiously bright. Nothing but a locked cabinet and a folding chair. Posters on the wall showed line drawings of smiling, compliant white people getting searched by smiling, non-threatening guards. _Know Your Rights._

“So, you can have a seat.” Wu, at least, had the grace to feel embarrassed about this chore. “You’ll take your shoes and socks off first, then your trousers.”

_Yeah, that’s how I usually take my pants off._ But I obeyed, unlacing my shoes and socks, unbuttoning my fly, shrugging my jeans down. 

Even though the room was already lit up like an operating theatre, Wu flicked on a small flashlight and examined my bare thigh with a plastic magnifier lens that was attached to his keyring. After a minute or two, he said, “Okay, I see it.”

“See what?”

“Subcutaneous implant.”

“I _don’t have_ one of those,” I said, my patience wearing thin. “I have a bone-anchored medi-port in my skull, exactly where I pointed it out when I filled in the form—”

“Then what would you say this is?” He pointed at my thigh with his pen.

There was a small lump at the spot, about the size of an English pea. “I don’t know, but it’s not an implant. Probably a spider bite.”

He raised his eyebrows. “How could a spider bite make the scanner go off?”

“I don’t know, I’m not an expert on scanners. Are you saying they never make a mistake?”

“Of course not. But I’ve seen a lot of sub-Q implants,” said Wu. “And I’ve seen a lot of bug bites. And to me, that looks very much like a recent insertion site. Inflammation hasn’t even gone down yet.”

“Look, fine, if you’re not gonna let me through the checkpoint then I’ll leave—”

“That is your right,” Wu said, not personally giving a shit either way. “We can also remove the implant, if you’re willing.”

“What, you want to go digging around in my leg with a medi-laser?”

“There’s no laser involved. We apply a mild topical anaesthetic, over-the-counter stuff, and remove the implant with a specialised vacuum tool—you’ll feel a slight pinch and that’s it.”

“But there’s no implant there.”

_Sure there’s not_, Wu thought. “It’s your choice, whatever you want to do.”

He was very confident, which was making me waver. “Do people ever…nobody has implants without knowing it, right?”

“It’s pretty easy to forget about them once they’re in place,” he said, with some satisfaction that I was starting to get real. Willing to let me save face, at least a little. “I think this one wasn’t inserted properly to begin with—it shouldn’t be that close to the surface, and that’s why the skin’s irritated. Obviously, you have a right to bodily autonomy and it’s not a crime to have sub-Q implants for whatever reason. You just can’t enter the prison complex with them, because they can be used to gather or report data illegally.”

“I get that, just…” Was it possible? I hadn’t had a grand mal seizure for several weeks, but when they happened, I normally lost about an hour’s worth of memory prior to the seizure itself. Somebody could have handled me while unconscious. I didn’t know anyone with a motive, but I couldn’t say it was impossible. “Look, dude, if you’re _sure_ it’s not a spider bite then go ahead and use your remover tool thing,” I said. “Because I don’t want some weird tech in my body either. I know you think I’m bullshitting you but I’m not.”

“I’m certain.” Wu held up his tablet, which displayed a consent form. “Thumbprint at the bottom.”

I pressed my thumb to the screen, and sat down again while Wu set about gathering his tools from the cabinet. Alcohol swabs in foil packets, anaesthetic cream, and a gadget that looked a lot like a blackhead remover that Dasha used to keep in the bathroom as a teenager. 

It was a surreal little procedure to undergo, considering that I didn’t even want to see my father very badly. Would he have submitted to this much indignity to visit me? I wasn’t sure. Dignity mattered a lot to him.

“Lumen, lights off, please.” His preparations finished, Wu turned on the vacuum tool. In the darkened room, it lit up my hairy leg with a blacklight beam. A bright white spot appeared, perfectly circular, in the centre of the spider bite. “See? That’s an infrared lens. It fluoresces because it’s made of zinc sulfide.”

“Jesus,” I whispered.

Wu applied the head of the tool to the swelling. A swift, puncturing pain, and then it was over. “Lumen, lights on, please. —There it is.” On one finger, he held out a tiny object, the size of a grain of rice. Grey plastic. “Would you like us to keep it at the checkpoint for you?”

“I don’t…um, yes, actually,” I said, wrapping my head around this discovery. I could send the thing to Ezra, or to Liz Murdoch, or… _What if it’s been there a long time? What if they planted it?_ “Please.”

“Okay. You can go ahead through the checkpoint now,” Wu said, and added without irony, “Enjoy your visit.”

* * *

The checkpoint passed me off to another security guard, who introduced himself—Thurgood—even though we had no interest in one another and I would never see him again. He didn’t make conversation, just walked half-a-pace ahead of me through the corridors of Canaan’s infirmary. 

Canaan was divided up into a ring of concrete buildings with a central admin centre. Not deliberately _trying_ to do Foucault, obviously. It was just a popular design for colonial outposts back in the 70s. Fourth building in the north sector, inmate health and elder care. 

Four North looked like a hospital with too many security guards. A lousy hospital—the nurses were harried, the patients weren’t getting any better, and the whole place smelled of skin, disinfectants, and unwashed bedsheets. A stink of failure. The guards and the inmates were highly attuned to any deviation from routine. Bored to death, that is, and looking up at me as I passed, wondering about me because they had nothing else to wonder. Staring because there was nothing else to look at. I kept my Neurable turned on because this blank wondering always made me anxious—too much need and despair, no way to fix it.

A withered old inmate, eighty-something, sat parked in a wheelchair by a nurses’ station. Half restraints, left arm free, clutching a stuffed frog in his claw-like hand. He threw the frog in my direction as I drew near, and I bent over to pick it up. It was filthy, like a dog toy.

“You can just leave it,” said Thurgood. “Doesn’t matter.”

I gave the toy back to the old man anyway, and he said nothing, not even making eye contact. He threw the frog again.

“Dementia,” said Thurgood. “C’mon.”

Why even keep someone like that in a prison, when his mind was gone? What harm could he still do? And this was minimum security, a cushy prison for men who had once had money. 

Ezra used to tell me to visualise shields and protections around myself, if the Neurable failed or if I still felt overwhelmed when it was turned on. Grasping at straws with New Age techniques, maybe—his abilities were so different from mine that he had to learn how my mind worked before he could advise me. But every time I felt desperate, I’d try it anyway: I imagined that I was an oyster, soft and stupid but protected by my shell. Guarding my treasure. Shutting out everything but the sea. 

We stopped at the end of the hall. My father’s name was displayed on the screen by the door. “I’ll be right outside,” said Thurgood, touching the security pad to open the door for me. “Visiting hours are over at three.”

“Okay. Thanks.”

Inside, the room was arranged to keep you in suspense for two more seconds: you came through the door and had to go around the bathroom cubicle before you could see the hospital bed. 

There my father lay, watching a dubbed Korean soap opera on a Lumen screen. I barely recognised him—he looked like the deposed tyrant of a small country, being paraded in front of the cameras with nothing left. He’d let his beard grow out, thick and ragged, even though he’d always been meticulous about shaving. His hair was longer than I remembered, rumpled, all gone grey. As Dasha had said, he’d dropped to a frightening weight, skin loose over his bones, belly bloated. Gauze and tape surrounded a feeding tube, visible above the waistband of his pajama pants, a pale fluid running through the tube from a beeping pump beside him. Prison issue pajamas; I knew that had to hurt him. 

“Lyova.” He blinked, then smiled, crinkling the tape of the nasal tube that fed him oxygen. “Lyovechka. So finally you come to see me.”

“Finally, yup.” _Get through this._ I pulled up the visitor’s chair beside the bed and sat down. 

“Nobody told me my son is coming.” He spoke slowly, as he had done since the first stroke. Forming words was a struggle. “Nobody tells me anything here.”

Possible, but I doubted it. “I filled in the visitation paperwork last week, they said they’d notify you.”

My father scoffed. “If the paperwork said so.”

I let the matter drop, and switched to Russian, thinking that he might find it easier. “How are you feeling, papa?” 

“You never used to ask…anybody, that question—you never asked. You knew the answer already.” Only a little more fluent. But although his words were vaguely accusatory, he still smiled at me, as if this were gentle ribbing from a fond parent. “Don’t you know how I’m feeling now?”

“I’ve got the Neurable turned on.”

“So? Turn it off.”

I didn’t want to, but I reached up and disengaged the Neurable. Needless to say, my father was suffering: he hadn’t slept properly in days, but was too tired to concentrate on anything; the feeding tube made him queasy; care workers had to help him turn over, which was degrading, and even then, he still had bedsores. Most of all, he knew full well that I wouldn’t have come if he were well. He knew what it meant.

“I’m sorry, papa.” Apologies were blood in the water. It slipped out anyway. “Dasha said you couldn’t eat, which—I know you can’t, yeah, I can feel it. But I brought these…” I offered him the box of pastries that I’d brought for him from the bakery at the spaceport, but he turned his head away.

“Too late for that now.” He fumbled for the Lumen’s manual remote, aiming one crooked finger at the mute button with shaky effort. The sound of the Korean soap cut out. “Do you remember—no, you were too small. One of the first appointments with…doctor, his name…I can’t remember. We were passing through neurology. A man as old as I am now, he’d had some accident. Bandages all over his head, his face. Brain damage, yes? His wife kept telling him, ‘you’re in the hospital, Vanya, you’ve had an accident.’ Each time, for him it was news. He would say, _‘Gospodi, Gospodi,’_ again and again.” It meant _oh my God_. “And then he would forget, and his wife would tell him again. You’re in the hospital, Vanya, you’ve had an accident. _Gospodi, Gospodi!_ He could never get used to it.” He laughed, though it was bitter. “Now I’m dying, and I keep forgetting it too. Then I remember. _Gospodi!_” 

“What’s wrong, though?” I asked him. “Dasha couldn’t get a straight answer from the staff. But they must have told _you_, right? What did the doctor say?”

I was expecting a rhetorical dodge, but my father answered bluntly. “Cancer. The tests came back after Dasha left me. In the pancreas, in the liver, spots in the lungs. Eating up my organs when I wasn’t looking. Out of all the things I used to worry about, I was never scared of cancer. Because I always thought I would die suddenly. One snip of the scissors. Bad men like me go quickly, you know,” he said, glancing back at me, a gleam in his eye for a moment. “God wants to send us to hell, so we have to be caught before we can repent, or there won’t be any justice.”

“You’re not going to hell.”

“So you say. Because you don’t believe in it.”

“Yeah, I don’t.”

“What happens, then?” he said. “All those minds you listen to all day. Where do they go?”

I sighed, and gave my father an honest answer. He deserved that much. “Vladimir Ashkenazy sits down at the piano. He plays a three-hour concert, then he stands up, takes a bow, and leaves. Where did the music go?”

He didn’t like the comparison. “So nothing happens, that’s your answer. Just emptiness, gone. Very comforting.”

“I didn’t say that. The music was real before it took form as soundwaves—wasn’t it? How else did Ashkenazy know how to play it? It was real ever since Mozart wrote it, or Bach or whoever. Maybe it was real even before that. Just as a dream. An idea. And it’s played again and again and again.”

“Mm.” My father considered this. “Reincarnation?”

“Maybe. Who knows?”

“I like that. I’d rather be alive again—as anything, a spider, a cockroach—anything rather than nothing. A cockroach can feel the sun. Eat its favourite food. Have children…” He trailed off, looking away. “It’s been such a long time since I felt the sun.”

“I wish there was something I could do.”

“Yes. You can.” He met my eyes, trying to gauge my mood. “My brilliant boy. You know how proud I was of you—always—don’t you know that? I wanted you to be smarter than me. Go where I couldn’t. Ezra told me you would be powerful. That you _are_ powerful. The strongest telepath he’s ever met, he said. And he’s met them all. You’re part of history. If the world forgets about me, but they remember you…it’s enough. Do you believe me?”

Hard to say. He had some agenda, and was trying to butter me up, but he wasn’t lying. “What do you need, papa?”

“Help me up. Into my chair.”

I had no idea how to go about that, what with the oxygen tank and the feeding tube pump, so I said, “I’ll get someone to move you.”

“Don’t _get someone_, help me yourself. Over there, in the corner—” He pointed a claw-like finger at the folded wheelchair by the door. “I need to get outside.”

“What for?”

“To get some air,” he snapped. “Some air, some light! They won’t even let me have fresh air. The light of this ugly dwarf star. I’ll never see a real sunset again, I’ll never go back home—you can take me outside, at least.”

I understood the nature of this subterfuge. “Papa, the guard’s right outside the door. If you’re not allowed to go outside there’s nothing I can do.”

“But that isn’t true, Lyovechka.” He smiled at me. The plan was rickety, but he had been thinking of it all day. _We can get as far as the train station at least. Maybe to the spaceport._ “The guard will do whatever you say. They all will.”

A little flame of rage flared in the pit of my stomach, and while I was trying to keep my face still, I felt my jaw clench. “We’re not doing that.”

“For ten minutes, Lyova, let me breathe properly…”

“Should I get Thurgood from outside or not? Maybe he’ll say yes—”

“Do you think I’m an idiot?” he said, talking over me. “Do you think I never ask to go outside? They won’t take me, they don’t care. Why can’t you do this one thing for me?”

“Because the last time I did, you got arrested.” I couldn’t believe this was even a debate. “That’s why you’re here on Phrixus instead of admiring sunsets on Earth.”

“And you love that,” he sneered. “You were so happy to forget about me. Taking your mother’s side—when I was the one who made you.” He paused, breathing hard over the hiss of the oxygen tank. “What you are, I made you. I could have sent Ezra Barany away with empty hands and empty pockets, that day he came to Piter to beg me for money! And what would you be then?”

“I guess I’d just be _your_ shitty kid,” I said in English, because that was the only way I could let off some steam through profanity. Swearing to my father’s face in Russian would have felt much more disrespectful. “Like I am now, except I wouldn’t have epilepsy or Asperger’s or migraines that make me want to kill myself—”

“Oh, don’t pretend,” he said, still in Russian. “Am I supposed to believe it’s really such a burden? You love that power you have, that power I gave you. You’re obsessed with it! Always looking down on everyone else, thinking you know everything. Happy to spend your summers on Perdigon while your sister had to stay home on Keto.”

Pure projection, but I didn’t bother refuting it. “So what? Why are we even arguing about this? If I like being the way I am, I’m ungrateful. If I don’t like it, I’m still ungrateful. How I feel doesn’t matter. You just want me to do whatever you say, but I’m not six years old anymore. If I mess with the guards, _I’ll_ be the one who gets arrested this time.”

“Please. How would they catch you?”

He was being sarcastic, so I gave it right back to him, waving a hand at the Lumen. “I don’t know, maybe the cameras? If you’ve noticed them?” 

“So make them delete the video.”

_“I don’t want to.”_ I had finally raised my voice. “It’s a stupid risk to take, and it’s wrong to treat people like bots for my convenience—_or_ yours—and I don’t want to do it.”

My father’s eyes filled with tears. His weak eyes, bare without his glasses, red-rimmed. “Lyova, I want to go home, I want to die at home. You could do this for me. I’m sorry, please…”

The guilt was pressing on me, but I was too angry to give in. “Listen, there’s no home to go to. Where do you think I could take you? To Mama’s place in Chicago? Because we don’t own anything in Piter anymore.”

“Just take me with you, take me back to Ursalia. I won’t bother you long,” he wheedled. “There’s room for an old man to visit, isn’t there? A few days of being free, that’s all I want. With my son, my only son. Then I can die happy. You can make everyone forget that I ever existed—it would be so easy for you…”

“Enough, papa.”

The tears overflowed, streaming down his cheeks and disappearing into his ragged beard. He drew in a sharp breath, looked up at me, and said, “One day…one day, I hope you’re as sick as I am. And I hope nobody helps you.”

He meant it. He had said nothing today that he didn’t mean. Some flattery, some conniving, some provocation, but no untruths. The words rang with the malignant power of an ancient curse.

I got up from the chair, slightly off-balance from the drugs and the adrenaline of anger. The sting in my thigh reminded me of what I’d put up with, just to come here and be treated like I was still six years old. Like I was still stupid enough to want to be his accomplice. 

My father flinched when I stood up, thinking for a moment that I might actually hurt him—a pillow over the face, maybe. I don’t know why he believed that, but the image flashed through his mind and his hands tightened into fists, under the thin blanket.

I said nothing; there was nothing left to say. Any last-minute apologies or words of love would just lead to more begging, more arguing. He watched me, wide-eyed, as I walked out the door.

Thurgood was waiting in the hallway, unfazed by the muffled row he must have overheard. 

“Can they take him outside for some air?” I asked him. My voice felt raw, as if I’d been screaming for hours.

Thurgood shrugged. “He’s allowed to spend time in the courtyard. This morning he said he didn’t want to go.”

“Have someone take him outside. Please,” I said, as I started back down the hall. “But I’m done here.”

* * *

Back at the security checkpoint, Wu stopped me. “We ran some diagnostics on the tracking device,” she said. “If you’ll just step into my office?”

I tried to regain my composure as he led me around a corner to his office. The space was compact and impersonal, shared between several employees, not even a family photograph on the desk. Wu had to adjust the height on the desk chair before sitting down and pressing his thumb to the login sensor by the computer.

“Just a few questions first.” He tilted the monitor to better see the screen. “Now, your paperwork says you’re not currently employed, is that correct?”

“Right.” I was trying not to scratch the spot on my thigh. Or there was another lump on the back of my neck—was that another implant, or some normal bump in the skin? “I’m just a student.”

“What are you living on?”

“My mother’s sufferance.”

Wu didn’t smile. “Not picking up any income on the side?” He raised an eyebrow. “Have you ever worked for a company called Telekit in the past?”

“No. They offered me a job once, but…” They were a telecom company, interested in pivoting to psionics. Ezra had always taught me that mixing telepathy with a profit motive would have disastrous consequences, and that tracked with my own experience. So I’d said no. “It’s an employee tracker, isn’t it?”

“Looks like it,” said Wu. “It was trying to contact a satellite network belonging to Florens Industries, a subsidiary of Telekit.”

“Aren’t—look, this doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Aren’t implanted employee trackers illegal?”

“On Commonwealth planets, it’s illegal to _compel_ an employee to insert a tracker,” Wu said carefully. “An employee can voluntarily agree to wear one, in high-security jobs. I’ve only ever seen them on government workers, so I was surprised to see one pinging a private company. But the tech itself isn’t illegal to possess, so you’re free to go.” He slid the tiny implant across the desk to me, sealed in a little plastic bag. “Just remember to declare it properly on the forms, next time you visit.”

I took the bag, peering at the implant. “You’re sure I don’t have any more of those in me, right?”

Wu shrugged. “The scanner only went off once. That’s all I know.”

* * *

What happened next took a long time for me to piece together. 

I left Wu’s office, following the rabbit warren of corridors back out through the administration centre. This time, the security checks all went off without a hitch: no beeps, no strip-searching, all scans clear. Thoughts of the implant preoccupied me, and I felt a gnawing guilt in the pit of my stomach for my father. _One day, I hope you’re as sick as I am. And I hope nobody helps you._ I was spaced out, but I must have reclaimed my coat and my bag before heading to the train platform. 

But I never reached it. 


	7. at my sky blue trades

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Lev indulges in some nostalgia, and the title is explained.

> _Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,_  
_ Time held me green and dying_  
_ Though I sang in my chains like the sea._  
  
—Dylan Thomas, "Fern Hill" 

This has, thus far, been a very selfish case history of my condition. Before I go on, I should broaden our scope. There were four of us at Hellouin, four of us who stayed and stayed while other students (or patients) came and went. Some of them were weak talents, end of story. Others had potential but couldn’t master the training, or they lacked the focus, or they wanted a normal life too badly and left as soon as they were functional enough to have one.

And we stayed. We held ourselves above them while also wishing we could’ve been like them. Were we cruel? Probably, as kids usually are in situations like that. My students can be cruel now too. John was impatient with anyone who was slow to learn, and the twins would lash out when they felt threatened. As for me, my besetting sin was that I didn’t intervene when I could have. 

Dido and Aristidis Metaxas were the third and fourth children to be conceived by the Barany Process. That wasn’t the only genetic engineering they’d undergone; their Greek billionaire parents had wanted a blonde and blue-eyed child, and had mixed success. The twins had light brown hair—Dido bleached hers to a violent platinum. _You want a blonde daughter? Here you go._ But their eyes really were remarkable, blue as the oceans of Nephele. The art of genetically engineering a beautiful face is hit-or-miss, but the twins were beautiful, with caveats—Dido had a prominent nose that made her seem endearingly gawky in profile, and Aris had the smooth, undercooked look of someone who would become handsomer with age. 

John Sciarra was the second success story of the Barany Process. Although it was close. We shared a birthday, but I’d been born at noon and he’d been born at night. John was the grandson of the physicist Gaetano Sciarra, who’d been part of the Bern team that discovered the warp drive. Prestigious, but not especially rich—the family ate the six-figure cost of a designer baby, hoping the investment would pay off. I suppose it did; out of the four of us, John was the most stable.

As far as I know, his parents did nothing cosmetic to his genes. He was born with a cleft palate, in fact, which was repaired when he was a toddler. It left a scar on his upper lip, thin and silvery. I think it left other scars as well, early and primal, hospital-scars and mirror-scars and camera-scars. He had thick hair, so black that I always expected it to leave ink-stains on my fingers when I touched it. 

The twins were both savants at dream manipulation. Dido had an uncanny memory for the visual details of a scene: she could reproduce any landscape or architecture after seeing it once, and she built dreamscapes that felt feverish, hyperreal. Mazes, castles, forests, ships. Aris had a similar talent for observing and mimicking people, from mannerisms to accents right down to odours and skin textures. 

The twins worked in their sleep, kept an inverted schedule, and experimented a lot with heavy sedatives (among other, more recreational experiments). They were artists of sleep. Aris in particular resented waking life, where nothing was under their control.

John’s abilities seemed primitive at first. He could induce pleasure or pain, knock you unconscious, or wipe memories in a ham-fisted way. A lot like a bottle of vodka. He could manipulate the chemical soup of the brain, and usually had some idea of your emotional state, but couldn’t hear your thoughts. 

I didn’t like John, at first. It was the birthday thing. Five years old, we each perceived this as an omen—someone who shares your birthday is a doppelganger seeking to replace you. Foreign celebrations on the holiest day of the calendar. Not auspicious. 

But Ezra had no patience for childhood superstition, and he yoked us together from the start. “The twins work together, so you two are gonna have to buddy up.” 

“I don’t need a buddy,” said John.

“Me neither.” I liked solitude, which relieved me of the obligation to act normal. “And we can’t work together. He can’t even hear me.” 

“So make him hear you. Your talents aren’t that different—I mean they _work_ differently,” Ezra said, to forestall a literalist argument. “Snow is different from rain, but they’re still both water. Right? If you try to understand each other I think it’ll make you both stronger.”

Hoping that we could duck the obligation easily, John gave a limp agreement. “Okay.”

“Fine.”

“That means I want you both on the same schedule.” Ezra was onto us. “Work together, study together, meals together. You can be apart for downtime but that’s it. I’m telling the monks what the plan is, and I mean _both_ the Benedictines and the Buddhists, so don’t try to weasel out of it.”

So that was it. From the morning bell to lights-out, John and I spent all our time together: sitting, mantra practice, studying with Ezra in the gardens or the cloister walk, a daily siesta for dream practice with the twins, exploring the marsh or the crater’s edge. 

The bond formed within a week, deeper than like or dislike. John’s mind—and his tactile, vigorous power—became an extension of my own. And just as Ezra had predicted, John soon gained the ability to listen to other minds. To listen, not to hear; it required concentration for him. We were stronger together. As if we were sitting back to back, I felt it every time he breathed. How much of him is still with me? How much of me is there left in him?

* * *

The abbey always did me good; a few weeks of their rigid, gentle routine left me feeling like a rescued animal—the deworming medicine starting to work, gaining weight, the mats shaved out of my coat. But Hellouin was something else entirely.

Photographers love Perdigon. The great Bonaventure Crater, the ruins, the permanent golden hour. Bonaventure II is bigger than the original settlement ever was, thanks to a small indie film industry. _Boy defies his Catholic family for his Muslim girlfriend, in working-class Bonaventure, Perdigon. Taut low-budget horror film set in the claustrophobic pre-fab settlement on Perdigon, after the disaster. Taut low-budget crime film, etc. Boy defies his working-class family to make unsuccessful small films on Perdigon._ I’ve seen every one of those little flicks and I kind of hate them, but I’m helpless against nostalgia for Perdigon and its cinematic twilight.

The school stood on the coast, where the Balamand Sea foamed white over white rocks and white sand. Pounded quartz. Fine as powder, it squeaked underfoot, like the singing of a wineglass. The mountains of the Alberic range ran northwest up from the shore, with Hellouin Mons crowning the headland. Old mountains, forested over with dark pines, streaked with snow through much of the year. The cliffs, like everything else, were bathed in the rosy light of Perdigon’s permanent sunset. 

With my father’s money, Ezra had built Hellouin as a fortress. It was vastly larger than we needed, capable of housing a thousand students—at our most populous, we had forty-seven. And it felt even emptier to me, since the thick walls were lined with heavy-duty psi-shielding. Silent as the Moon. 

The basement was six levels deep, carved into the bedrock. On the lowest level, the telepathic silence was profound. There was nothing down there but rows of identical cells, like a dormitory or a prison. When we were having meltdowns and needed quiet, we went down there. Voluntarily, I mean—no one was locked in. New students started down there, and worked their way up as they proved they could tolerate more psychic noise. These rooms had several nicknames: the tombs, the hermitage, isolation. John Sciarra called them the Lazaretto, which was a kind of quarantine station at sea.

“They used to be leper colonies in medieval times,” John said, when Dido asked him what the word meant. We were sprawled in the grass together, above the lowest cliff over the sea. A running leap would plunge you into deep, cold water. “After Lazarus in the Bible. Not the one who came back from the dead.”

“Since when are there two?” Dido was hitting her vape pen as she lay with one arm folded under her head, her bare feet crossed lightly in Sciarra’s lap. 

“Well, Lazarus was one of Jesus’ friends, but Lazarus the beggar was a fictional character in one of the parables,” John said, ever the pedant. I’m no one to talk, but John outdid me. “So I guess there was only one real Lazarus, yeah.”

“What parable was this?” I asked. We spent enough time around the monks at Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Rencontre to be loosely familiar with Bible stuff, though none of us came from a religious family. John was a firm atheist who, as a matter of meditation study, happened to like the Benedictine side of the abbey better than the Buddhist side—anapanasati gave him panic attacks. I was the other way around.

“Dives and Lazarus,” John said. “The rich man and the leper.”

“There’s a lot of lepers in the Bible, dude,” said Aris, who was leaning on my shoulder. They had been swimming earlier, their hair dripping down the back of their neck, and they were wrapped in a thick purple blanket, like an emperor’s _toga picta._ “You’re gonna have to narrow it down.”

John sighed. “Okay, well, stop me if you’ve heard this one before. There’s a rich man, and there’s a poor leper. They interact in exactly the way you’d expect. They both die, and the rich man goes to hell. But far away, he can just barely see Lazarus in heaven, at the right side of Abraham. The rich man cries and begs for Abraham to help him, and Abraham’s like, ‘oh, no can do, you’re in hell now, sorry.’ He says the rich man already knew the Torah and should have seen this coming. Should’ve been nicer to Lazarus. The rich man asks Abraham to send Lazarus back to earth to warn his family that, y’know, hell is real and they’re in danger. Abraham says no, because they’ve read the Torah too, and they already know what kind of life they’re supposed to live.”

“They have the dharma,” I said.

“Yeah. And if they won’t listen to the dharma, what are they gonna listen to? They already know that they’re living shitty lives, so what’s supposed to happen when they get a big dramatic warning from beyond the grave? Like Ezra says about that Cuchulainn story—what kind of warning would have made a difference?”

“I fucking hate that story,” said Dido, digging into the junk food we’d brought with us, sour mango candy bought in bulk from the Celestine settlement near Hellouin. “I don’t care what Ezra says, it’s defeatist as hell. Are we just never supposed to try to change anyone’s mind?”

“I think the point is that some people don’t listen, and that’s their fault, not yours,” I said. “Not that _nobody_ ever listens.”

Dido tore a hole in the bag. “Yeah, well, some people are assholes. You still have to try. With everyone.”

John wanted to get back to the leprosy, so he dragged us back on topic. “The _point_ is that medieval people knew the Bible better than you guys do, and when they set up hospitals for lepers, they called them lazar-houses or lazarets. A few centuries later, during the Black Plague, people put up quarantine stations on uninhabited islands outside major coastal cities like Venice. The Lazaretto outside Malta was huge, before it went underwater—Lord Byron was under quarantine there once, coming back from Greece during a cholera outbreak.”

“You think we’re sick, then?” Aris had been looking up at the sky, which was still saffron-gold even though it was late at night by the clock, but at that they tucked their chin down again to look at John. “When we have to go down there for isolation? Hazardous, infectious waste…”

“I didn’t say waste. You don’t quarantine waste, you just throw it away. You only purify something worth saving in the first place. But sometimes you feel infectious,” John admitted, more quietly. His hands were resting loosely in his lap, holding Dido’s bare feet. “Sometimes you can be freaking out so bad that you set it off in someone else. We’ve all seen it happen.”

“I still like it better than calling those levels _the tombs_,” I said. “At least you can get out of quarantine. Alive, that is.” 

“No, don’t take my drama away.” Aris pulled their blanket tighter around their shoulders. “Drama is all that keeps me alive when I’m down there. ‘_Excuse me_ while I go to _bury myself_ in my _own grave_…’” 

“Leper colonies aren’t dramatic enough?” I said. “Shouting ‘unclean’ when anyone gets too close?”

“Do I get to wear a bell?”

“Of course.”

Aris laughed. “Fine, you got my vote.” 

I describe all this and I know that to outsiders, the Lazaretto still sounds sinister. No matter what you call it. To some people, it was. Some students hated it down there, creeped out by the unusual experience of being totally head-blind. Or they were claustrophobic, and did better with fresh air out on the mountainside. 

But the Lazaretto also saved lives. Mine, more than once. I spent more time down there than John or the twins, and often had to be coaxed out. At Regiopolis, I often wished there was a place like the Lazaretto which would house me and hold me, protect me from the disruption of other minds.

* * *

Why can’t I get back there? Not just to Hellouin or to the abbey—why can’t I get back to _those years_, when I was good at the only thing people expected of me?

Stolen afternoons in the woods, climbing up to the crater to scream over the guardrail. Waking up in the small hours of the night to find Aris and Dido watching terrible movies in the common room, always ready to shove over on the couch to make room for me. The terrestrial radio stations reading the shipping forecast at midnight, _warnings of gales in Balamand, Mazan, and Porta Coeli_, listening in the dark with my earbuds in, down in the Lazaretto. 

Why is all this stuff just gone? Gone and never coming back, even if I go to the places where it used to exist.

Everybody feels this way. I know that. I’m telling myself a story about a past that existed only sporadically, trying to hold onto what can’t be held, making myself unhappy. But still I feel like if I could see and feel the past again—a good strong hit of it—I could start to let go. Just let me hear those radio interval signals one more time.


	8. call for the captain ashore

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After collapsing outside the prison, Lev finds himself in a strange place, with a significant gap in his memory.

Crash-landed on planet fuck. My whole body hurt, every muscle, joint, and tendon. All but my left arm, which had gone numb from the shoulder down—I must have been lying in the same crumpled position for hours without moving, my face mashed into the pillows.

What pillows? Where?

The room was dark. “Lumen?” I mumbled, but there was no answer. “Hello? Lights?”

Nothing. By the bed, some off-brand display screen said the time was 2:47am, in pale apple-green digits. That was the only light in the room, apart from a ribbon of light under a door.

I pushed myself up on my elbow, wincing, and tried to get my bearings. Still in my clothes, on top of the covers. The bed itself made me think _hotel_. Pillow-shams, with pillows underneath that were worn out yet weirdly scentless, belonging to everybody and nobody. An unnecessarily high box-spring and bedstead. The bedspread’s slick, satiny finish, gridded with lines of machine-quilting, had left tracks in my skin. 

The artificial gravity was wrong. I’m neurotic about the grav, I’ll admit. The smallest deviation from standard feels unbearable to me. It’s one of the things I can’t stand about Nephele—every motion feels subtly _puffy_. Even on dry land, you’re swimming. Which becomes exhausting; all I do on Nephele is sleep. 

This wasn’t Nephele.

My phone was still in my pocket, but its screen wouldn’t light up—dead battery. I fumbled for the manual light-switch on the bedside table. The thick drapes were drawn, and I got up to open them. Not quite steady on my feet, knees and back stiff, my left arm prickling with pins and needles. 

When I pulled back the edge of the drapes, there was nothing. Floor-to-ceiling viewscreens in place of windows, and they were powered off. I turned them on and saw the view outside: nothing but the black of space, and the vast curvature of a planet below. Cool mossy-green and lichen-grey, streaked with cloud and ice. I was on a ship over Phrixus.

What the fuck had happened?

I dropped my forehead against the cold glass of the screen. _“Blyaaad’,”_ I muttered, exhausted and frustrated. But if this was a ship, then that told me how to contact the AI—civilian ships normally used an on-board system called Horizon instead of the Lumen OS. “Okay, Horizon?”

A welcome electronic chirp, and Horizon’s synthesised voice addressed me. “How can I help you?”

“Name and destination of this ship, please.”

“This is the Commonwealth passenger ship _Canopus_, en route from Phrixus to Ursalia. We’re expected to touch down at Le Havre Spacefield in approximately thirty-four hours of ship-time.”

In other words, I was exactly where I was meant to be, according to my return ticket. 

By now, I could put together some of what had happened. Somewhere between the prison and the train station (probably), I must have had a grand mal seizure. My medical data-chip had instructions not to hospitalise me unnecessarily for routine seizures—medics might have decided that I was fine to go. In the thick of a post-ictal haze, anxious about making my flight, I had bumbled my way to the spaceport, and…

Even as I thought about it, I was having trouble believing this story. Had I really navigated all the way through security checks, found my gate, and boarded while confused and heavily medicated? I had enough trouble dealing with the intricacies of spaceports when my head was clear. Someone must have helped me.

Why had I forgotten? My seizures were normally bookended by periods of amnesia—ten minutes, maybe half an hour—but many hours had gone by. I _could_ have had a worse post-ictal period than usual, but that made it implausible that I’d been able to keep my shit together long enough to board the ship. Bad post-ictal confusion was essentially a very short psychotic episode: last time I had one, I spent three hours trying to put lightbulbs in the dishwasher.

My carry-on bag was left on the floor beside the bed, and nothing seemed to be missing from it. Including my meds, which was nice. I docked my dead phone at the charging port, popped a tablet of Aquility under my sore tongue, and checked the bathroom. 

Which was untouched, toiletries nestled in the basket with the washcloths, end of the toilet paper roll still folded into a neat triangle. My face in the mirror was a mess: sallow and shell-shocked, bruised and swollen, a trail of road rash over my cheekbone. A crust of dried blood was smeared over my chin—there was a corresponding swollen place inside my mouth where I’d bitten my tongue. 

That was all the detective-work I could do on my own. I rinsed my face and took the keycard with me on the way out. The ship had starboard and port marked out with red and green stripes along the hallway carpet, so I found my way aftward to the bank of elevators, where there was a helpful deck plan posted with emergency directions.

The ship’s corridors were deserted at this hour. The concierge desk was five decks down, and the lifts didn’t run the entire height of the ship; I had to walk the length of the ship to reach the fore lift when a galley got in my way. Exactly what I felt like doing when every major muscle group in my body was sore. The hallway speakers were very quietly playing a cursed easy-listening rendition of “Sloop John B” on the harp, over sounds of fake ocean waves. I wanted to kill myself.

The concierge was a kid my age who (like me) was a five out of ten with bad skin. He was eating a sandwich as he watched something on his tablet, the sound tinny and the screen cracked. He looked up at me and his eyes widened when he saw my beat-up face. “Everything okay?”

“I’m not sure yet.” I gave him a _ha ha everything’s normal_ smile and said, “This ship does a video-biometrics manifest, right?”

“Yeah, for security.”

“Can you do me a big favour and show me my entry?” I didn’t press him psychically, because I didn’t want the kid to risk his job, and just used my most ingratiating tone instead. “Is that allowed?”

“Uh…” the concierge asked, swivelling his chair around and waking his console screen. “I can probably—can I ask why you need it?”

“It’s stupid,” I told him apologetically. It kind of was. A long shot, at any rate. If I could see myself checking in I’d have a better idea of what was going on with my brain. “There’s just something I’ve forgotten and I know I still had it when I checked in.”

“Huh.” He typed for awhile, not turning up anything useful. “Is it lost luggage? Because I can check if anything new got turned in.”

“No, I really just need to get a look at the video, if that’s okay.”

He let out an exhale, puffing his cheeks out. “I’ve literally never had to do this before, but I’ll see if they’ll let me. What’s your name?”

“Lev Mozersky.” I spelled it for him and he typed it in.

“Let’s see…nope,” he said, shaking his head at the screen. “No option to retrieve that info, sorry. It’s stored on government servers, we’re not allowed to just pull it up.”

So much for that. “Okay, thanks for trying.”

“Oh, but there’s a notification for you. Another passenger left a message, it says. Room 8939, Eamon Cabral, he said to come talk to him when you wake up. Anytime is fine.”

No idea who that was. Deeply confused now, I thanked the concierge and headed back on the long hike to my room.

* * *

When I got there, my phone had recovered some battery life. “Longsat call to Ezra Barany,” I said, stretching out on the bed to rest. Longsat calls took awhile to find an available satellite array and connect, so I used this time wisely by pressing my face into the pillows to indulge myself in precisely one single muffled scream.

Okay. Feelings expressed. Done. 

My phone pinged when it was ready, and I turned over on my side to see the screen while it charged in the dock. _Connected. Waiting for response…_

Ezra answered presently, and seeing him again made my chest feel tight. He was at the abbey’s guest house on Perdigon, and he looked like he’d fallen asleep on the living room recliner. I missed that place. I missed Ezra. His greying curly hair was rumpled from sleep, his blue eyes shadowed. “Lev? It’s five in the morning here, kiddo, what’s going on?”

“I don’t know.” My voice cracked, and I swallowed. “Something’s wrong. I went to see my dad on Phrixus, he’s got cancer—”

“What? Jesus, Lev…” Ezra sat up to lean forward in the chair, alarmed. “That’s awful, I’m so—”

“—and they stopped me at security,” I barrelled on, barely listening to him. My father had just become the least of my problems. “They searched me and they _found something_, okay, they found a subcutaneous implant and I have no idea what it is. Who put it there, what it’s for. All they said was that it was contacting servers owned by Telekit, and what the fuck? Are they following me?”

_“What?”_

“And I had a seizure, again—I just broke my streak last week and now I’ve had another one, I woke up on the ship, I have no idea how I got here—”

“Lev, hey, c’mon…” Ezra was struggling to process all this. “Slow down. Just. One thing at a time. Where are you?”

“I’m on the _Canopus_.” I forced myself to breathe between sentences instead of just raving. “It’s the spaceliner going home to Ursalia. The right ship, the right room. I’m exactly where my ticket said I should be. But I don’t remember the spaceport, I don’t remember boarding…”

“You just woke up there after a seizure?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” Ezra’s shoulders relaxed. “Look, I know—God, I know _exactly_ what it’s like to wake up and not know what the fuck is going on. And you must feel like shit.”

“I want to go home,” I whispered, closing my eyes. The same thing my father had wanted. _There’s no home to go to._

“Well, you’re on your way. Right?” Ezra plainly had no idea what to tell me. His social skills weren’t much better than mine. Should’ve tried to get hold of Jacob instead. “So…hang tight and you’ll get there. Did you take your meds? The Aquility too?”

“I took everything I’m supposed to take. Did you hear me about the implant?”

“I heard you. Just…” Ezra sighed. “Please, please don’t take this the wrong way. Please don’t. But can you see your doctor when you get back to Ursalia?”

“You don’t believe me.”

He didn’t, on balance. Even without being able to read his mind, I could tell that. “I don’t think you’re lying to me, Lev, but you’re under…like, a _ton_ of stress right now,” he said, counting the stressors out on his fingers. “You don’t have the best relationship with your dad, and he’s sick, and he’s still _in prison_, and meanwhile you’re having some major wipeout seizures. Your face is a mess, you must have hit the ground hard. And you hate those big spaceliners. It’s a lot, that’s all. This has happened before, even—remember, with the lightbulbs in the dishwasher?”

“This isn’t just—hang on, stay on the line…” I went to unzip my carryon bag and found the tiny plastic bag from the security checkpoint. The implant was inside, a tiny sliver of grey plastic. “Look,” I said, holding it up to the camera lens on my phone. “This is what they dug out of my goddamn leg.”

“Which—yeah, exactly, this is why you should see your doctor. An expert. Someone who can run tests and figure out what’s happening. And…well, if she doesn’t know what that thing is, you can send it over here,” Ezra added, relenting. “Murdoch might be willing to take a look—I can’t tell from here, obviously.”

“Sorry.” I felt a rush of shame. Calling up my old teacher in the middle the night, with a crazy story, as though he were a family member, someone forced by love to put up with me. “Of course you can’t, yeah…”

“It’s okay. I don’t mean to sound like a dick. I probably do anyway.” Ezra rubbed the back of his neck. “I don’t know what to think here, Lev. Could Telekit be running surveillance on you? Sure. Could it be some other company that’s trying to muddy the waters? Yeah. You have—Christ knows we tried to protect you kids for as long as we could, but you have a talent that’s in demand. If it’s paranoia, I don’t blame you for feeling paranoid. Fuck, this isn’t comforting, is it?”

Nope. I tried another angle. “Do you know anyone called Eamon Cabral?”

“Cabral? Um…” Ezra unfolded his tablet to search. “He’s not in my contacts. Ahriman doesn’t have anything either. Why, who is he?”

“He’s on this ship, apparently. He left a message saying I should come talk to him. Is this…tell me I don’t die like this, okay?” I was trying to pass it off like a joke. Unconvincing chuckle. “Nobody’s waiting in that cabin with a net and a shotgun? Like in the Magritte painting?”

I wasn’t sure if he’d answer the question. Ezra often ignored my inquiries about the future, whether serious or frivolous. Not this time, though. “You don’t die like this,” he said, and his voice was firm. He knew. “But don’t go. Not tonight. Haven’t you been through enough? I know it’s hard but just—relax. Please. Take a few hours and sleep this off, get your head together. You’ve got a long flight and this guy isn’t going anywhere.”

“Yeah.” I was thinking of my old guest room at the abbey, a monk’s cell like the others, whose emptiness had always felt reassuring. A clean, focused place without distractions or baggage. Nothing extraneous. When we began to spend our summers at the Hellouin facility instead, I kept my room laid out the same way. Twin bed, desk, chair, closet. I missed that. Left alone to improvise a life in the outside world, I was only making a mess. “You’re right, yeah,” I said, rubbing my face and wincing at the bruises. “Um. I’m sorry I woke you up.”

“Don’t be sorry. Call whenever you want, Lev.” Ezra gave me a pained, guilty smile. “You know you’re the only one who still calls? I know Johnny’s busy with school, but I never hear from the twins anymore.”

I didn’t know how I felt about being the only Hellouin student who couldn’t seem to cut the cord, but it surprised me that the Metaxas twins were so silent. “Really? They’re not talking to Jacob either?”

“Jacob would’ve said something. What are they up to, do you know?”

The twins were still in my list of contacts, but their names had been dimmed for almost a year—offline. I’d assumed that they’d changed accounts, or that they had me blocked. Tired of me. Who wouldn’t be? “They haven’t sent me anything in a while.”

Ezra didn’t like that news, but he tried to brush it off. “I mean, people drift away, it happens. Just part of growing up. But it’s hard to let go, I guess.”

“What about your current crop of students?”

“We’ve got a handful of good ones this year. But it’s September, so they’ve gone back home.” Most students only stayed at Hellouin for the summer, returning to traditional school in the fall. “That’s why Jacob and I are here at Bon-Rencontre, it’s all empty and spooky at Hellouin.”

“I wish I was back there,” I said. The after-effects of the seizure had made me emotional; a dim, rational part of me knew that, but the sadness lingered anyway. “Hellouin or the abbey, whichever.”

“You can come back whenever you want to. Fuck knows we could use some teaching help. But you’re in your last year at Regiopolis, don’t give up now,” Ezra added. “I regretted dropping out. Always just…felt like a missing tooth, you know? Knowing that I put those years in and got nothing back from it. Unfinished business.”

“Stay in school, duly noted.” I smiled, trying to look like I was okay. It looked grotesque with my battered face. “I’ll let you go. Thanks, Ezra.”

“No problem. Goodnight, Lev.”

I tried to take Ezra’s advice, burrowing under the covers. Hard to get comfortable in these beds. Something itched—a specific itch with a shape and a weight to it, as if something was lodged under my shirt. Like a plastic clip or hanger that I’d forgotten to remove when I bought the thing. Nothing there, though. 

Half an hour later, no closer to sleep, I threw back the bedspread and sat up again. I needed to know what was happening. Ezra had said there wasn’t any physical danger, and mostly seemed to be worried that I’d make an idiot of myself. Personally, I figured that was an acceptable risk. My head was already starting to clear. I could handle this.


	9. leonard, it's winter in ottawa

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some answers, and some more questions.

> _The streets are full of overweight corporals,_  
_of sad grey computer captains, the impedimentia_  
_of a capital city, struggling through the snow._
> 
> _There is a cold gel on my belly, an instrument_  
_is stroking it incisively, the machine_  
_in the half-lit room is scribbling my future._
> 
> _It is not illegal to be unhappy._  
_A shadowy technician says alternately,_  
_Breathe, and, You may stop now._  
_It is not illegal to be unhappy._
> 
> — John Newlove

I recognised Eamon Cabral while I was still in the hallway outside his cabin. His mind tasted familiar, leaking out from behind the door, and it took me a few moments to place it. The man sitting behind me on the train to the prison, the man who’d been dreaming of witch trials, talk show hosts, an abandoned school, a flock of chickens, and a broken staircase. Smuggling contraband through a series of ever-tightening passageways.

Now, I could feel him awake, playing _Knossos_ on his tablet to distract himself from his nerves. Which could still strike him, even after all these years, on a case like this. One eye on the time. Cultivating his patience, pruning it stem by stem, like a bonsai.

I had fallen still, listening, but now came forward to thumb the screen beside the door. The chime sounded faintly within.

“Come in,” he called, and Horizon disengaged the door lock with a _kachunk_. 

I came inside. Eamon Cabral was a stocky yet vulpine man in his late fifties, whose thinning ginger hair was streaked with grey. He wore a heavy green cardigan against the ship’s chill, and thick glasses that had slid halfway down his nose. 

He looked up at me and pushed his glasses back up. “There you are—have a seat, please.” His voice was gravelly but precise, with an accent that I used to hear a lot on Keto: British, Australian, Indian and South African immigrants working together in shipyards. “I know you don’t drink. Tea?”

I didn’t come any closer, and ploughed right into his mind without warning or apology. In his recent memory, I saw the dossier about me that he’d been reading. Public and private records, web analytics, scientific papers. He had read about my conception and the three miscarriages that had preceded my successful implantation. He had read about my selective mutism in childhood, my focal seizures that later became generalised, my abnormal corpus callosum, my unusual levels of activity in Broca’s area. Court records, my testimony in the judge’s psi-shielded chambers. Reading all this, Eamon had felt sorry for the Mitya described in those papers. _Guinea pig. Poor lad._

But as I unravelled his memory further, I came to a blank horizon. Lost time, like a hard night of drinking. But he hadn’t touched a drop. No headache, no hangover, just a chalky taste in his mouth. Drowsiness. Of his own past, he couldn’t remember much more than his name—which might have been fake, for all that either of us knew. His instructions had been left in a manila envelope on the bed beside him, along with a second bottle of pills. _The amnesia is temporary, to protect operational security. Mozersky will meet with you. Read the dossier to prepare._

“What…” I approached the table where he sat, resting my hands on the back of the chair opposite. Not yet ready to sit down with him. “What’s going on? You’re some kind of—you’re with the government.”

“Very good.” The teapot was sitting on a trivet in front of him, and he reached out for it. “Care to guess the agency?”

I stopped him, making his hand drop limply to the tabletop. Dead weight. The teacup rattled in its saucer. 

“No,” I said. “Listen. We’re not doing a single other goddamn thing until you tell me what’s going on. People have been fucking with me all day and I’m done being nice about this. I want to know who you are.”

“_Very_ good,” he repeated, pleased to see me taking initiative, but cautious until he realised that I wasn’t actively forcing him to talk. “Well. You already know my name. I’m Assistant Director for the Ursalia Regional Office of the Commonwealth Intelligence Service. Or possibly some other equivalent rank—I gather that some names have been changed to protect the guilty, including my own. I’ve been asked to make a few overtures toward you.”

“Overtures.”

He shrugged, although his right shoulder was still paralysed, so the gesture was crooked. “Flowers, candy, valentines. We don’t expect love at first sight, of course, but we’d like to be friends. I’m sure that doesn’t surprise you.”

It didn’t, not really. Aris and I used to trade conspiracy theories, half-serious, wondering what use the world would find for us. We had our orders from Ezra to resist corporate and political influence, but where did that leave us? Teaching other telepaths to sit in the Lazaretto doing nothing? _What’s left for me in Rome?_ Aris would say, quoting Juvenal. _I can’t tell lies…_

I was still trying to dig up more of Eamon’s memories about me, but couldn’t find much. Except… “You’ve been following me, you were on the train from Stornoway to Canaan.”

“We shared a train car,” he admitted. “But I haven’t been part of any surveillance operations on you.” 

“So it was just planting trackers under my skin, sure, big difference.”

“The implant’s not ours. Private sector.” He nodded at his right hand. “Would you like to let me have my arm back, and I’ll tell you what you missed?”

Feeling a thread of guilt, I released my control of his muscles, and he flexed his fingers, rubbing the heel of his palm against the tabletop to relieve the pins and needles. I sat down in the other chair, slumping forward to rest my chin on my folded arms.

“Thank you,” he said, and poured the tea into two cups. “Cream and sugar?”

I shook my head, not completely certain that he wasn’t trying to poison me.

“Well, the guards at Canaan followed procedure.” Cabral doctored his own tea, methodically ripping open four sugar packets in turn. “They removed the implant, checked to see which servers it was trying to contact, and logged the event for the Commonwealth government. I don’t need to tell you that you’re flagged in the system, do I?”

The extra scrutiny I got at the prison could have told me that. “I figured.”

“And meanwhile, the implant itself sent an emergency signal to its parent company, Telekit. Those sub-Q trackers are all designed to tattle when you pull one out. Takes a hardware expert to keep one quiet, and these are prison guards, not engineers. Now,” he said matter-of-factly, “you should know that Telekit _has_ been following you.”

“What?”

“Since you landed on Phrixus at least, and probably on Ursalia before that. They know that your range is short. They’ve kept just out of reach, but their technicians were nearby. In a van, pretending to repair cables. As you left the prison complex, one of them hit you with a pulse pistol.” Eamon woke his tablet again and pulled up a series of pictures. “Here.”

Even with my telepathy, I wouldn’t have believed him without the pictures. But there I was, sprawled on the ground like an assassinated politician. And there was the cable van, and two nondescript workers in boiler suits. One was white, the other was mixed. One with a tablet, face turned away from the camera, the other one holding the weapon. Pulse pistols looked undignified in those days, heavy and rectangular. Cops still preferred bullets, in most jurisdictions. “Why would they do that?” 

Eamon shrugged, and didn’t answer my question. “The electromagnetic pulse triggered a seizure, which I don’t think they were expecting,” he said instead. “Those pistols are supposed to knock the victim right out. You screamed bloody murder when you went down, and it made a scene. They panicked. Gone in thirty seconds. I took point to call the medics.”

I continued to page through the album of pictures. Frame by frame, like a flipbook. The ambulance, the medics bent over me. No obvious signs of shopped photos, but of course an intelligence agency wouldn’t be obvious about it. “These could be fake.”

Eamon opened his hands. “Am I lying to you?”

He wasn’t. He was nervous about convincing me, afraid that I’d reject his evidence (and hurt him, maybe), but he wasn’t being dishonest. This was the information he had, and he was giving it to me. Any deception would have come from higher up. 

I looked up from the tablet and studied his face. “So you’re the one who got me onto the ship?”

“Yes, because you were very bleary, and inclined to forget what you were doing. I explained that we were travelling together and that you were ill. The spaceport’s personnel were very accommodating.” Eamon smiled. “We got to board first, even. I should fly with you more often.”

I wasn’t in the mood. “You should have brought me to the fucking hospital, dude.”

“I would have. _You_ were uncooperative in the extreme, and insisted on making your flight.”

“Wow, I’m so sorry to have inconvenienced you.” But it was starting to make sense to me—or rather, I was running out of reasons to disbelieve him. Between the pulse pistol, the seizure, the head trauma, and the meds, it did make sense that I’d had an episode. Fixated on getting home. Putting the lightbulbs in the dishwasher. “So you did this—what, so that you could try to talk me into working for you?”

Eamon picked up his teacup. “No. Corporations may think they can control a resentful telepath, because they think money and brute force can solve every problem. But the government isn’t that stupid. I have no intention of cajoling you into anything. However. You’re a Commonwealth citizen, and it’s in our best interests to keep foreign corporations like Telekit from exploiting and manipulating you.”

I let my head drop to rest in my folded arms, pulling my mind back from his. “I just…wish everyone would leave me alone.”

“Leave that to us,” he said. Such a kind voice, like a friendly uncle. I’d never had an uncle. “I’ve a few questions for you.”

“Fine. Go.”

“Someone inserted that implant. When could it have happened?”

I gave an unhelpful, adolescent shrug.

Eamon pressed me. “Have you been in compromising positions with strangers? Sexually active?”

“I—what?”

“Simple question. Are you sexually active?”

The backs of my ears felt hot. “Don’t you know that already?”

“Your dossier suggests that you’re not. Bit of a homebody. Nothing wrong with that, of course. But we’re not watching you around the clock. I was following closely today to get a chance to speak with you, but we don’t ordinarily keep such close tabs.”

I sat up, rubbing my bruised face. “I’m seeing someone, and we’ve messed around but haven’t had sex. Happy?”

“Have you been asleep around them?”

I had, of course. I’d fallen asleep with my head in Nesrin’s lap last week. But she had no reason to do this to me. “I’ve been asleep around a lot of people. I have five roommates. Sometimes I sleep in class. That’s hundreds of people. C’mon.”

Eamon ignored the red herring of my classmates. “A roommate might’ve done it. But so could a sexual partner.”

“I think I’d wake up if someone stabbed me with a needle.”

He reached out and snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Have you learned anything at all today? Consciousness can be altered, Lev. Drugs. Pulse pistols. Concussions. Seizures.”

“Yeah, _I know,_” I said, stung. “I’m not a fucking idiot.”

“Then take this seriously. Ezra Barany has had a stranglehold on the entire field of psionics for twenty years. You’re the strongest telepath his school has produced. You refused to take a job with Telekit—you refused all the offers. Psionics as a closed shop is the Barany policy, and has been for some time. Fine. But now these companies have no incentive left to treat you nicely. They’re sending their agents, and one of them has already succeeded. The Commonwealth government is the only protection you have, because we _don’t_ want someone as valuable as you to fall into the wrong hands. Let us help you.” 

I said nothing.

He paused, lowering his head to catch my gaze. “I know. You want to be left alone. That’s fine. We’ll investigate. If anyone’s taking advantage of you, they’ll be prosecuted. If not, no problem. Your roommates, we know already.” He found a page in the dossier. “Brace Andrews, Johanna Hume, Lupe Velazquez, Anders Selberg, and Michel Poirier. What about the person you’re seeing?”

“Jesus fucking Christ.” My brain was starting to send little pulses of pain through the right side of my skull. Warning shots. “I’m not giving you any names you don’t already have.”

“Why not?” Eamon had his hand poised over his tablet screen, ready to enter any data I gave him. “If there’s nothing to worry about, then there’s nothing to worry about.”

“I can’t stop you from finding out who I’m seeing. It’s not a secret relationship. But I’m not going to feed names to some government agency based on one conversation with a guy whose long-term memories _I can’t read,_” I snapped. “Because you don’t need me to tell you. You just want me to get comfortable telling you things.”

Eamon gave a silent acknowledgement, sitting back in his chair. “Not as naïve as I thought.”

“Not quite,” I said, standing up. “I’m going back to bed.” 

He let me get to the door before he spoke again. “Lev?”

I stopped. “What?”

“Dido and Aristidis Metaxas. Where are they?”

I looked back over my shoulder at him. A mistake, to let him see me waver. “You don’t know?”

Eamon raised his eyebrows. “Do you?”

Where the fuck had the twins gone, if even the Commonwealth government couldn’t find them? “I’m done talking,” I told him, and left.

**Author's Note:**

> As always, reader, your friendship on [Tumblr](http://doctorcolubra.tumblr.com) would do me honour.


End file.
